Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Year: 2009

Rating: 3/5

Summary: Following the death of their aunt, Elspeth, identical twins Julia and Valentina are given the opportunity to fly across the Atlantic and live in London for a year after inheriting a large apartment located beside Highgate cemetery.

Up until this point, Julia and Valentina have always done everything together, including attending – and dropping out – of the same colleges. While Julia is the more domineering twin, Valentina is the sensitive one, also more prone to sickness due to her long-suffering asthma and bad heart.

When the twins arrive in London they befriend Martin (the neighbour from the flat upstairs suffering from severe OCD that confines him to his home) and Robert, Elspeth’s grieving lover, who lives in the apartment below them.

While struggling to come to terms with the dramatic change in their lives, it is Valentina who begins to feel a presence in their new home; a feeling as though someone – or something – is watching them. What the twins will soon discover is that it is this presence that will unlock family secrets that could tear them apart forever.

~*~*~

My Thoughts: You do have to forgive the plot I’ve written for this book. I found it really hard to summarise and, to be honest, had forgotten a lot of the characters’ names and little details that would have been remembered by someone who thoroughly enjoyed it.

While I was a huge fan of Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, I found this to be a little disappointing. The twins move to London during the first couple of chapters and, up until the last quarter of the book, nothing much happens. I felt it was too slow and there wasn’t enough character development to keep me interested. Julia and Valentina, as characters, are a little stale. Julia’s bossiness is a clear reflection of her own insecurities. And Valentina is shy, sensitive, and lets her sister walk all over her mostly due to the fact that she’s ill a lot of the time. That’s about it really. No real development from that point. It’s more or less obvious from the beginning that Valentina will try to overcome her shyness and find some independence so nothing too surprising happened there.

One of the aspects I did find interesting about the twins was that they were mirror twins. This means that Valentina is exactly the mirror image of Julia, which includes having her organs the opposite way around. I wish Niffenegger had mentioned more about this rather than ‘mentioning it in passing.’ It could have been a fascinating element to read about but was unfortunately brushed away as soon as it was mentioned.

The same kind of thing goes for the neighbours. As characters, Robert and Martin are nothing more than stereotypes. Robert is the rich lover, grieving for his beloved and trying to find his way in the world. Martin is everything you’d expect from an OCD patient (if you’d never met one).

The characters were bland, just bland, which is a shame. It felt like Niffenegger was more intent on giving us descriptions of Highgate than the actual story. Three quarters of it were spent describing London and the cemetery, almost as though she needed to prove that, even though she’s American, she’s been over here and knows what she’s talking about. It felt like she spent so much time researching where her story was set that she forgot the key thing: her actual story.

Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I did reward this book 3/5, and that’s only because the last quarter of this book saved it from dying a death. Everything happens in the last quarter. It all suddenly comes out of nowhere and it’s exactly what we’ve been craving. While some of it is fairly predictable, Niffenegger adds enough of her ‘WTF?’ element into the story to keep us reading. (‘WTF?’ element = the different dates, places and times in The Time Traveler’s Wife, for example.)

I can’t really go too much into the story because, to be honest, for the majority of the book, I felt that that was what it was lacking – a story. But it all came together in the end. Kind of.