"Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger
Product Description(Amazon.com)
Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.
# Paperback: 406 pages
# Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (September 29, 2010)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1439169012
# ISBN-13: 978-1439169018
MY THOUGHTS: This is my book clubs choice for September. I have wanted to read this book and I'm really glad I did. It was a very good book. I really liked all the characters. I really liked Martin a lot. I could feel for him. Does he get to leave his apartment? Does Robert get his Thesis done on Highgate Cemetery? As Julia and Valentina move to London they seem to grow apart. Valentina wants to be separate from Julia. With the help of their Aunt Elspeth's ghost they think of something that seems so impossible. But does it work? Will Valentina get her wish and be separate from Julia? You'll have to read the book to find out the outcome of this very interesting book.
5 comments:
This is on my list as well. Glad you enjoyed it. Looking forward to it.
I didn't love this one. I thought the characters were absolutely brilliant but I didn't buy the story at all. I think my expectations were sky-high after The Time Traveller's Wife!
I really enjoyed the characters a lot, but the story line was kind of out there. I haven't read The Time Traveler's Wife, but have seen the movie.
Sherrie
I'm the same as Mummazappa. I enjoyed it a lot, but nowhere near as much as The Time Travellers Wife.
Was it worth the mega-advance she got? :)
briony--couldn't resist chipping in on your advance comment.
from a publishing perspective, this book was a disaster. a different publisher paid millions of dollars for a book that might be good but will always live in the shadow of a book that actually did earn millions of dollars. i feel bad for a lot of people involved, because any future books she writes will be tainted by the "failure" of Her Fearful Symmetry (i put "failure" in quotation marks because if i were ever to write a book and sell that many copies, i'd be quite pleased with myself!).
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