As a huge admirer of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife it brings me no pleasure to say that her second major work Her Fearful Symmetry comes as a significant disappointment. Where Traveller’s was deep and visceral, impeccably composed, thrilling and emotive with rich and delicious characters, Symmetry (aptly for its title) is quite the inverse. The prose is bland, the characters uncompelling, and the plot is fundamentally weak. Whereas Traveller’s presented its time travel theme with impressive plausibility, the supernatural narrative of Her Fearful Symmetry is acutely non-credible. The quality and the style of the books are in fact so different that one feels like they have been written by different authors; but if this ghost story was written by a ghost writer, Niffenegger and her publisher have been ripped off. My only conclusion can be is that this novel is Niffenegger Light, and ringing as it does with the tone of a children’s TV drama, succeeds only as an overlong and mediocre story for Younger Readers.
Review: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
