Guest Review | Her Fearful Symmetry | Audrey Niffenegger
Hey
everyone! My name is Anjali, and I blog over at This Splendid Shambles.
I’m really excited to be guest posting today, and to be a part of this great
new blog project! I’ve been doing book reviews over on my blog for a while now,
but I was really pumped to be able to contribute to this one. Just a few quick
things about me: I’m a New Zealander who has recently moved to England after
finishing my Philosophy Degree at the end of 2011. I love books (obviously) and
movies, and like to think that I am an artist, musician, photographer and
occasional writer. I love DIY and am forever making things and filling up my
house with bits and pieces where ever I can find room. Oh and I have a slight
(okay…quite large) obsession to Harry Potter. Nice to meet you!
Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger
I picked this book up in a charity shop about a month or so ago, and the main reason it caught my eye was that it was written by the same author who wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife. I love that book, and I seem to recall giving it a 5 stars on my blog. If The Time Traveler’s Wife was anything to go on, then Her Fearful Symmetry, I thought, would be a good book. And for the most part, it was.
The book is
about twin girls Julia and Valentina Poole who left their American home to move
to London, England into a beautiful flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery. Their
aunt, Elspeth (their mother’s twin sister), had just died and left them the
flat, with a few conditions – they had to live there for a year and then they could
decide whether or not to move on, and the girls’ parents were not allowed in
the flat at all. Strange terms, I know, but there we have it. The story follows
the girls as they arrive in a new place, meet the neighbours, explore London
and figure out the Underground, and later on discovering that their Aunt
actually never left the flat at all – and it becomes a ghost story.
For all of
you who like a bit of the supernatural in your novels, this isn’t really your
typical ghost story at all. Without giving too much away (sometimes I feel like
I do that), Niffenegger writes Elspeth-the-Ghost into the story as though it’s
the most natural thing in the world. Much like her time-travelling man in The Time Traveler’s Wife, she has taken
a supernatural element and made almost…well, natural. There is a mixture of
themes/topics/issues, such as friendship, love, loss, separation, family
secrets (BIG family secrets!!), a man who won’t leave his flat, and sisterhood
bonding and the need for individuality.
The book is
easy to read with just the right balance of description and conservation, and
though I found that there were a few chapters that probably really didn’t need
to be in there as they didn’t seem to add to the story at all, it was quite an
enjoyable read. I also found that it was quite funny in some points, because
Niffenegger writes about what the girls thought of London and England, there
were many times when I thought “Yup! That’s exactly how I find it too.” For me,
it was easy to relate to some of what the girls went through, because, being a
‘stranger in this land’, as my Mum puts it, there are a lot of things that I
have to get used to being here, and it was the same for Julia and Valentina.
All in all,
it was an easy going, makes-you-want-to-believe-in-ghosts story that, even
after a slow-ish middle section, really picked up at the end with some
startling events. I recommended this book for people who perhaps, don’t really
like the supernatural/fantasy sort of genre, but feel they should read
something in that area anyway. Does that make sense? It’s naturally
supernatural, and that, I think, is something that Audrey Niffenegger does
really well.
Review written by guest blogger Anjali.
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