"[3] The novel is a coming of age story, the main protagonists are 'sparky Christina', the daughter of Alice, and her 'saintly adopted sister Pam' who could not be more different.

[4] They meet similarly mismatched friends Jago and Peter, and the intersecting lives of the four as they grow up form the heart of the novel.

Michael Dibdin writing in The Independent explains that "The title puns on the Elizabethan sense of 'juggle': to play tricks so as to cheat or deceive somebody.

The most daring and skilful juggler of all is Barbara Trapido herself, who puts her characters through dizzying permutations of gender, identity, background and relationships, both personal and genetic.

The pace increases imperceptibly, creeping up on the reader, until what started as a fairly sober and straightforward study of generational conflicts ends in a pyrotechnic climax which exploits every Shakespearian device - identical twins, lost siblings, transposed parents, unlikely couples, outrageous coincidences and brazenly expedient plotting - to an extent which might have made even the Bard blush."