Terri M. LeBlanc
Written on Jul 1, 2010
At last - 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 flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin ...but have no idea that they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive 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 twins' mother - and who can't even seem to quite leave her flat...With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, "Her Fearful Symmetry" is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger's familiar themes of love, loss and identity.
It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.
- ISBN10 0224085611
- ISBN13 9780224085618
- Publish Date 1 October 2009 (first published 1 January 1999)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 October 2012
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 400
- Language English
Reviews
empressbrooke
Written on Oct 8, 2009
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.