Her Fearful Symmetry

by Audrey Niffenegger

Another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers — normal, at least, for identical “mirror” twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her amazing flat in a building by Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin … but they have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the OCD-suffering crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the mother of the girls — her own twin — and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat….

• ISBN10: 0307397467
• ISBN13: 9780307397461
• Publish Date: 6 July 2010 (first published 1 January 1999)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: Vintage Canada
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 416
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780307397461

Reviews

[Terri M. LeBlanc]

A enjoyable read from start to finish. Much less confusing than than Niffenegger's first book, but the themes are very similar.

[empressbrooke]

I definitely don't know how to review this one. For context, I adored Time Traveler's Wife to pieces, and I normally keep my distance from anything that even hints of romance. The entire time I was reading Her Fearful Symmetry, I had a hard time remembering that the same author wrote both books. HFS has a nice gothic atmosphere, which reaches from the tone to the ghostly elements to the setting (London's Highgate Cemetery). I felt like it had more in common with [a:Tana French|138825|Tana French|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1243599201p2/138825.jpg]'s (awesome) mysteries than it did with TTW. The style and the writing were all excellent.

Not so excellent: the characters. One of the things I loved about TTW is how the main characters felt like real, fleshed out people. The ones in HFS aren't quite as impressive. They're interesting (we have two sets of twins, a man with severe OCD, and people who work in the cemetery), but they never managed to become more than characters in a book.

The plot is where I really struggle with how enthusiastic I am about the whole thing. I don't want to give it away, because there are some really good twists and turns, but the whole final portion of the book is the result of a character making a completely ridiculous decision. A decision that's akin to burning down your house to get rid of all the dust rather than just picking up a dust rag. I like what resulted from the decision - the ending is completely satisfactory in a morbid, tragic way - but I keep getting stuck on the absurdity. It's ALMOST enough to make me knock off a whole star, except that I enjoyed my time with the book too much to do so.