"Audrey Niffenegger's spectacularly compelling second novel opens with a letter that alters the fate of every character. Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American twenty-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the enclosed letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt, whom they never knew, has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to their inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother."The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Elliot, Radclyffe Hall, Stella Gibbons, and Karl Marx are buried. Julia and Valentina come to know the living residents of their building. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword-puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive compulsive disorder; Marijke, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt.
"Author of one of the most beloved first novels in recent years, Niffenegger returns with an unnerving, unforgettable and enchanting ghost story, a novel about love and the tenacity of life--even after death."
I really enjoyed Niffenegger's first book and this one was no exception. I finished this book at almost two this morning because I just couldn't put it down.
It started off very heart-wrenching and progressed at a steady pace. Even the parts where the twins were wandering London gave insight into their characters. I loved the settings (partially because I'm from some where around the area where the Chicago portion of the story takes place and I'm dying to go to England to study abroad and see London.) Her descriptions of the places were beautiful. Even Highgate Cemetery had a very hauntingly etherial appeal to it--even for someone like me who has a bit of an..."aversion" to cemeteries. I think I may even go to visit the cemetery when I go to England.
I enjoyed Robert as a character because he was the perfect foil to the "Americanness" of the twins. He was sweet and kind and slightly awkward, which the author manages to make attractive. My heart broke for him when he lost Elspeth. Martin--because he lived in his own OCD world, trapped in his flat without the woman he loves--almost seems like he has his own side-story. This provided a relief from the density of the rest of the book. He was very difficult not to feel for. He was a brilliant man, trapped in his flat because the world has become too difficult to handle. The twins were functionally disfunctional--though this sounds funny, this is the only way to describe it...you'll understand when you read it. Valentina quickly became my favorite twin; I think because I saw a lot of myself in her. (Not in the way when she...well...I can't give anything away, so you'll just have to figure out our relationship to one another.)
Overall, this book was intense and morbid in a Victorian-gothic romance-sense. Quite a bit darker than her other book that I've read, this book was deep and intense and made you think. I look forward to reading more from her because of the brilliant twists and turns and the surprises that keep you salivating for more.
"A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love."