Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Her Fearful Symmetry is a dark and haunting story following mirror twins Julia and Valentina. Their mother Edie is also a twin but has been estranged from her sister Elspeth for 20 years. Now Julia and Valentina are 20 yrs old and have just found out that their aunt, that they never knew, has died and left everything to them with a few stipulations that are mystifying. They must be 21 yrs old before accepting any of it and live in her flat in London for 1 yr before they are permitted to sell it, plus, their parents must never be allowed to stay there in that flat.

Niffenegger is a literary artist in the way she paints a visual canvas using only words. The story was well written and the characters are well developed and very easy to like. She has woven a tale that keeps you interested in every aspect of the many characters without being confusing and gives a glimpse of London to those of us that may never make it over there. I fell in love with the people and never found a point in the book that was lagging where I felt a need to skim through just to get by.

Towards the end the story takes many unexpected turns (and I'm usually great at predicting twists) and some of them made me *gasp* while others left me frustrated. The book was already at 400 pages but I didn't care for the abrupt and odd ending, I wished she would have stretched it a little longer to give it an end that matched the rest of this fantastic book.

Ending aside, this was an absolutely wonderful book that kept me turning pages for hours on end, I finished it in one day because I couldn't put it down. I recommend this book as long as you are not a person that gets bent out of shape when a book doesn't end your way with the perfect happy ending. This one is far from that and definitely borders on odd and disjointed in the last 1/4 of the book, but still was an outstanding novel.