Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Having read The Time Traveler's Wife, and having absolutely loved it, I couldn't wait to start reading this book. And for about the first 300 pages it was going swimmingly; the characters were doing well in not stepping outside of themselves (pun intended), the story was going in a pleasant direction where you were rooting for each one of them to get what they have set out to accomplish, and then, boom. A drastic change takes place in each one of the characters and you find yourself wondering where the heck it all went wrong.

Things go downhill from then on, and the story that was delivering what I felt it promised with the promotional comments printed on the back of the book jacket--"an achingly sweet love story"-- suddenly became creepy, harsh and just wrong. An unnecessary, pointless twist is thrown in, it appears, as an afterthought, given the ease with which it is not so much resolved as just fizzled out with a brief, melodramatic scene between a husband and his wife.

There's nothing wrong with things going wrong in a story, of course, as long as the author fixes it by the time the last sentence is reached. This, sadly, doesn't happen with Her Fearful Symmetry. The ending resolved nothing, except helped one character overcome his obssessive compulsive disorder in order to be with the woman he loves, but that story is secondary and to the side. A part of me found this unfortunate, since I felt the story of an obssessive compulsive sufferer was the best part of the book and deserved a book all on its own, but I digress.

Audrey Niffenegger remains a writer who spins magic with her prolific writing and I look forward to her next work, but she fails miserably at this attempt to present different forms of love with ghosts and spirits in the mix just to give prominence to a place she took more care in presenting accurately than the characters-- London is beautifully presented to the point where I could feel the rain described.

Read this, as it is entertaining, but don't expect the end to live up to the beginning.