Tania's Book Review

Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger

I had high hopes for this book, not only because I really enjoyed Niffenegger's first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, but because I love ghost stories and Her Fearful Symmetry was supposed to be a gothic tale about ghosts, dark family secrets, and romance.

The novel starts out strong and with lots of intrigue as we learn about the two sets of twins the story is centered around. Elspeth and Edwina are the older twins who haven't spoken in more than 20 years. At the beginning of the book, Elspeth dies and leaves her London apartment to Edwina's 20-year-old twin daughters, Valentina and Julia. In her will, Elspeth declares that the twins can sell the apartment if they wish, as long as they promise to first live in it for a full year and as long as their mother and father never step foot inside it.

Valentina and Julia, who are inseparable in an unhealthy way, decide to move to London. When they move into Elspeth's flat, which overlooks London's famous Highgate Cemetary, they eventually meet some interesting neighbors - Robert, Elspeth's longtime boyfriend who lives downstairs, and Martin, the obsessive-compulsive upstairs tenant who hasn't left his apartment in more than a year. Eventually they also meet their dead aunt, who returns as a ghost who is trapped inside her flat but able to communicate with Robert and the twins.

The novel starts to fall apart about 2/3 of the way through. When the dark secret between Elspeth and Edwina is finally revealed, it's confusing; and when Valentina and her dead aunt conspire a way for Valentina to finally break free from her possessive sister, their plan is a little "out there" and hard to believe even for a novel whose main characters include a ghost! And unfortunately, the end of the book is anticlimactic and puzzling.

If you want to read a great story about twins and family secrets, a fantastic and much better novel is The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

The verdict: 3 stars out of 5