Author: Audrey Niffeneger
Whoops! I forgot this one in my book count from last year. I guess I really read 84 books, which puts me only four back from 2008, when I got to 88 (but several of those were cookbooks, I just can't not be competitive, even with myself!).
I know there are lots of people out there who like fantasy and science fiction. I'm not one of them. I barely tolerated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid and I hated A Wrinkle in Time (what kinds of enemies have I earned myself?). For some reason, even though her characters travel through time and live as ghosts, Audrey Niffeneger's books feel enough like real life that I really like them. Does that even make any sense?
And I guess I also have to recant some of what I said here, because although I found the first three-quarters of Her Fearful Symmetry to be totally charming, it did get weird at the end. The book is the story of Valentina and Julia Poole, twenty-year-old identical twins who live in Chicago when they get the news that their aunt Elspeth (their mother's identical twin) has died, leaving her London flat and her fortune to them, under the condition that they come spend a year living in the flat. By the time they arrive, Elspeth comes to realize that she's not so dead after all, living as a ghost, but limited to the confines of the apartment. The girls become close to the other people living in the building (including Elspeth's lover) and learn secrets about their mother and aunt.
I heard Audrey Niffenegger interviewed somewhere (was it Fresh Air? Diane Rheem?) about writing the book, and how she became a guide at London's Highgate Cemetery (the cemetery figures prominently in the narrative). I find that I enjoy books a lot more if I've heard the author speak about the writing process (which I guess shouldn't be all that surprising). In this case, I wonder if I would have liked the book as much without the author interview or the good feelings I had about The Time Traveler's Wife-- if it had existed in a vacuum. It's a quick read and a page turner, but the end strayed a little bit far from what this realistic kind of girl felt entirely comfortable with.
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