Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Occasionally I am at a loss for words when I write about books. I like to say that I enjoy most books and I give most of them the benefit of the doubt and I can appreciate the writing, story telling, and overall effort it took for the author to patiently spend hours writing and editing his/her masterpiece. I for one, could never imagine painstakingly sitting hunched over a computer writing page after page of fiction. I do have to give credit where credit is due, Ms. Niffenegger did write a novel, and that is about the nicest thing I can say about it.

I probably had great expectations from this book given that her previous book, The Time Traveler's Wife was probably one of my top 10 books from the last decade and this book was a total let down. The adjective fearful is the perfect description of the book, although I would have probably used creepy. This book was creepy.

The story began with the death of a woman named Elspeth, who had a younger lover named Robert. Elspeth is an identical twin (her sister's name is Edie). Edie has identical twins named, Julia and Valentina. Elspeth left her twin nieces her flat in London and asked that the twins live in the flat for a year. The only clause is that their mother, Edie is not allowed. Edie and Elspeth have not spoken in years.

The twins are very close and have an almost incestuousness relationship. The are so dependent on one another that they are rarely alone. Upon arriving in London they meet one of Elspeth's neighbors, Martin who suffers from OCD, (Martin is the only saving grace in all of the characters of the novel). The novel continues for another hundred or so pages with boring scenes of London cemeteries, dead people, a cat, animal cruelty, ghosts, a weird love affair, more weird ghosts, and a really weird ending.

In summary if you want to force yourself to read something that when you finish, you will ask for your time back, then this is the book for you! I actually read this book twice, just in case I missed some higher, deeper meaning but I used all my analytical powers, even read my notes on existentialism and I could come up with nothing! it was just weird and creepy.

I give it a 2.