A rather improbable but well written twin-ghost-story, interesting characters, staged in and around Highgate Cemetery, London. ( )

This board if full of plot summaries for Her Fearful Symmetry. They are very well done and tell you everything you need to know. I consider the book to be well written, but there are some plot points I struggle with. There are a few things that are just too vague and ambiguous. I'm going to head over to a discussion group to try to wade through some of it.

This book made me question a lot of things in my own life. Some of the sentences in the opening pages really resonated with me, although they didn't actually have much to do the the overall plot. Having recently lost my grandfather, I have been thinking a lot about the afterlife.

Some thought-provoking lines: "Marijke suddenly saw the cemetery as an old theatre: the same play was still running, but the costumes and hairstyles had been updated." When a loved one passes away we typically feel like no one else has ever experienced such a thing. I began to see funerals and death from the perspective of the cemetery.

"He felt that some sort of exchange was about to take place: he would give Elspeth to the cemetery, and the cemetery would give him…what, he didn’t know. Surely there must be something." It does seem a bit unfair that we give something beloved to us to the grave, but we get nothing in return.

And finally, "A bad thing about dying is that I’ve started to feel as though I’m being erased. Another bad thing is that I won’t get to find out what happens next.” I often wonder just what my legacy will be. I don't have children (yet..ever..?)and I feel that when I die, only my husband will truly mourn me.

I would recommend this to others, if only for the chance to really mull over your own life. ( )

I don’t know how to rate this book. I thought the premise was creative. I enjoyed the information about Highgate Cemetery. I didn’t really like any of the characters, other than Martin, the OCD neighbor living upstairs, but he wasn’t a necessary player in the story. Generally, I liked this book until about the last quarter. At that point, the plot took such a ridiculous turn that it really ruined the entire book for me. I also think several of the intended plot twists were predictable. Still, I’m not sorry I read it. I’m still pondering the ending, so at least it made me think. ( )

Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry has probably been my most looked-forward-to book of the year. I (like everyone else) loved The Time Traveler's Wife. What I liked about it: the love story, the supernatural, the fact that you get so engrossed in the characters that you don't care about the flaws or holes or plausibility of the time traveling. I knew that Her Fearful Symmetry was going to contain the same kind of supernatural storyline woven into the plot, and I was excited for the escape from reality.

Niffenegger's second novel (6 years after her first one) involves two sets of twins: Elspeth and Edie, and Edie's twin daughters, Valentina and Julia. Elspeth has just died of cancer and left her London flat to her two nieces whom she has never met. So when the inheritance kicks in as the girls turn 21, they decide to leave their home in Ohio and take their humdrum, unmotivated lives to London.

Valentina and Julia are the kind of twins that you look at and say, "Shouldn't they have grown out of that by now?" They look the same, dress the same, but unbeknownst to the casual observer, they do not think the same. Though they have always led their lives "together," things are changing. Julia wanted to go to London; Valentina did not. Valentina wants to go back to college; Julia does not. They struggle with their codependence and their desire to be apart, but ultimately, Valentina feels stifled by Julia and wants to lead her own life. While fighting their internal demons, they encounter some external ones as well. The twins learn that the ghost of Elspeth is trapped in the apartment, and they can communicate with her. Throw in the creepy setting of London's Highgate Cemetery and an eccentric supporting cast, and we have ourselves a kind of ghost story.

The strongest part of this book is the setting. Niffenegger's sense of setting is fabulous. She is so descriptive and has a skill of setting the scene to draw you in the mood and tone of the story. The secondary characters are also excellent. We meet Robert, Elspeth's younger lover that lives in the flat below the twins, and Martin, a middle-aged OCD man who is determined to get better so he can get back his wife that left him. However, I was left with a lot of questions about relationships. For one, the author attempts to describe some kind of complex twin love that sounded frighteningly more sexual than it should, but she never took it far enough to really matter. The aspects of relationships that should've been deeply explored were not. I never felt too connected to most of the characters; they just didn't have much depth, and I couldn't really understand the logic behind their actions or emotions. Martin and his wife Marijke ended up having the most satisfying storyline of all.

I don't know if it's because I've read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies, but at exactly page 306, I knew how this story would conclude. I didn't even have that much desire to read more than just the last page. But I forged ahead, and yes, I was correct in my guess. I was left at the end just saying, "What?" A lot was left open, and I don't mean "open to interpretation" open. I mean it just seemed like she got lazy and gave up. Audrey Niffenegger has proven herself to be a creative person, so I know she's got it in her!

I couldn't put down Her Fearful Symmetry. It was an engrossing read that I got through quickly. I enjoyed reading it, but I don't know if I liked it. However, I've read several reviews that say this was the reviewer's favorite read of the year, so to each her own, I guess. ( )

Note: There are no spoilers in this review.

It’s probably good that I’m one of the last people in the universe to read and review this book, because unlike many others, I didn’t actually like it very much.

The story concerns two twins, Julia and Valentina, twenty-years old (although often mistaken for twelve). They are small, undernourished, they dress alike, and they are more than just identical: they are mirror-image twins. That is, every cell in each body is symmetrical with each cell in the other’s body:

"The marvel was most evident in X-rays: while Julia was organized in the usual way, Valentina was internally reversed. Her heart was on her right side, with all its ventricles and chambers inverted. …”

The mother of the twins was herself a twin, but the girls never saw their aunt. When the aunt died of leukemia, they received a will indicating they were to inherit her flat in London, but there were stipulations: they had to wait a year, and they could not let their parents visit. They complied.

In the flat in London, they live on the floor between two other neighbors. Below them lives Robert, who had been involved with their Aunt Elspeth. The upstairs neighbor is Martin, a victim of severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) whose wife Marijke had left him, unable to put up with his compulsions any longer. Valentina gets involved with Robert, so Julia befriends Martin. But Julia doesn’t really want to be separated from Valentina, so Valentina hatches an escape plan.

Discussion: Ghosts and symmetries of all sorts play significant roles in the plot. It also seems to be assumed that readers will ruminate on the nature of life and death, life after death, good versus evil, love, and identity, since these issues are overdrawn with an obviousness just shy of heavy-handedness. But in my opinion, the injection of supernatural elements into the plot militates against serious contemplation of these issues.

Evaluation: It’s hard to define what I didn’t like about this book. To start with the characters, I didn’t like the twins, nor their mother or aunt. I felt impatient with the character of Robert, who was weak and easily manipulated. Martin was perhaps the best-drawn character, but his OCD was exasperating. The double ending (yet another symmetrical plot occurrence) was doubly dissatisfying: quickly resolved with many questions unanswered, as if the editor had said, “Alright! Let’s wrap it up now!” ( )