Very Short Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

Audrey Niffenegger has broken my heart.

The Time Traveler's Wife could be one of my favorite novels of all time; Her Fearful Symmetry could be one of the worst novels I've ever read. The beauty of Wife was in the way Niffenegger took an hackneyed concept (time travel) and made it new and heartrending. Symmetry revolves around two equally trite ideas (ghosts and twins) and... Well, it's just bad. It's choppy and filled with deus ex machinas and one-dimensional, archetypical characters. It's an ode to a cemetery that Niffenegger loves, with a poor plot devised to showcase it. It reads like a story written by a 20 y.o. creative writing student. Niffenegger's prose is pretentious, ambitious, juvenile, etc., it's filled with unbelievable 'quirky' characters, and one gets the impression that she ends on a melancholy note to try and impress the reader with a sense of literary significance or whatever.

Why, Audrey? Why?

In other news, Love in the Time of Cholera makes me want to write letters. Anyone want to be pen-pals?

More 'mores', less 'lesses'.

Resolutions:

1. Eat more vegetables.
2. Drink more tea*
3. Be more social**.

That's it.

* (and, inherently, less Diet Coke.)
**(Though, at the beginning of the week, this was "Stop being social altogether", so...)