Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey NiffeneggerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Audrey Niffenegger builds fantastical situations from a perfectly normal, realistic foundation. In Her Fearful Symmetry, twin sisters Julia and Valentina inherit their dead aunt Elspeth's estate, including a London flat (apartment) that overlooks High Gate Cemetery. Their aunt's will stipulates that they must live in the flat at least one year before selling it and that their parents (Elspeth's twin sister Edwina and her husband, Jack) aren't allowed to step foot inside. Nothing strange there.
Except Elspeth is haunting her flat.
From there, the story goes into Elspeth's attempted communications with the living, how the living respond, and learning about the building's other residents. It was a very delicate ghost story, I suppose, and I loved the way Niffenegger described Elspeth's world once she was caught between the living and dead. I also loved the other building tenents - Elspeth's boyfriend Robert, who develops a thing for Valentina, and Martin, an OCD crossword creator, and his radio-personality wife, Marijke.
What I didn't love were the attempts at mystery: Why were Edwina and Elspeth estranged? Why didn't Elspeth want the twins' parents in her flat? What was the big secret about Elspeth that Robert didn't know? And what did Robert mean when he told Valentina that Elspeth wasn't really a nice person when she was alive? Didn't he love her? But the answers didn't offer any real revelations or surprises.
As Valentina became more and more obsessed with Robert and talking with Elspeth, Julia became rather boring to me. I felt like Niffenegger was looking for something for Julia to do, so she decided to pick one of the strongest characters in the book for the girl to visit: Martin.
And I fell in love with the quirky man and his wife.
Martin and Marijke's relationship became way more interesting to me than what the twins or Elspeth's ghost were doing. Martin and Marijke, their incredible love, his impossible sickness, and her unimaginable strength. Now there's the story I want to read. So while Her Fearful Symmetry was beautifully written and introduced some interesting thoughts about the spirit world, I was disappointed in the end.
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