Monday, January 25, 2010

Book eight: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

What's not to like - two sets of twins, ghosts, a cemetery, a secret, and a pet called The Little Kitten of Death. This book was hard to put down, which explains both how I finished it in two days and why I was so grumpy when Monsieur Henry refused to take his nap this afternoon. I just wanted to READ, dang it!

Excerpt:
"The next morning Valentina watched Elspeth reading. Valentina had laid half a dozen old paperbacks creased open on the carpet in the front room. Elspeth read each page spread, then moved to the next and the next. She was mixing old favourites (Middlemarch, Emma, A Prayer for Owen Meany) with some ghost stories (The Turn of the Screw, plus bits of M.R. James and Poe) in hope of finding a few tips on haunting. The effect was slightly disconcerting. When she had read all the open pages she would go back to the first book and laboriously turn the page. Then she would proceed to the others, going along the rows until all the pages were turned. Valentina could only see some of Elspeth; her head, shoulders and arms were visible, but the jumper she was wearing vanished somewhere around the bottom of her rib cage. She was floating inverted above the books; if her whole body had been there she would have appeared to be dangling from the ceiling. If she had any blood it would all have gone to her head. As it was, she looked perfectly comfortable."
I read Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife back in the start of 2006 and it was a great way to kickoff that year. Her Fearful Symmetry is the same. 8 down, 18 to go.

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