Book finds Symmetry in characters

A good book is concise, organized in a well-written manner with an interesting plot and has characters readers can identify with and understand. With Her Fearful Symmetry, published and released in October 2009, Audrey Niffenegger accomplishes all these tasks and more.

Niffenegger staked out her place as an author with her instantly popular 2003 best seller The Time Traveler's Wife which, like Her Fearful Symmetry, combines love and the supernatural.

In this twisted, familial story of love and loss, the connection between sisters is tested and the bond between twins is tried. American twins Julia and Valentina are living their easy and uncommitted lives in the States when their Aunt Elspeth, and their mother's twin sister, dies in London, leaving the two of them with a cluttered flat and a large sum of money.

While Julia is content to leave, Valentina has her doubts, which Julia overrides and makes the executive decision to jump the pond to London. There is only one condition, their parents must not set foot in the apartment for at least the first year. This is just the first of many curiosities throughout this novel.

The building Julia and Valentina move to houses more than just the two of them. Their neighbor is obsessive-compulsive Martin, who has lost the love of his life, Marjike, due to his illness. Below them is Elspeth's young ex-lover Robert who is so lost without Elspeth that he withdraws into himself and his thesis on none other than Highgate Cemetery, which they all live right next door to.

Another inhabitant of the flat, though unbeknownst to most all, is Elspeth herself who after death became a ghost stranded indefinitely in her old flat; however inconvenient, it is the best place to spy on the teenage twins and their new life in England.

The attention that Niffenegger allots to each of her characters, whether major or supporting, is the main difference between this novel and her last novel six years ago.

Although Julia and Valentina are the focus of the novel, enough of the novel homes in on Robert and Martin that the reader feels as though they know them just as well if not better than the ethereal twins with their strained and lopsided relationship.

The themes of this book are so vast, ranging from death and life after death to the choices humans make without any thought to their ramifications.

While no book, even one by Niffenegger herself, can amount to The Time Traveler's Wife in terms of relationships, romantic or not, and the organization and choice of words that either make or break a novel, Her Fearful Symmetry caught and held my attention through the twists, turns and surprise events all the way to the novel's conclusion.