My book club just read “Her Fearful Symmetry” by Audrey Niffenegger.<\/p>\n
I hated<\/strong> it and will, forthwith, enumerate the reasons why.<\/p>\n Number one: Third person omniscient point-of-view sucks anyway<\/em>, and Niffeneggar executed it particularly badly in this novel, sometimes writing from different characters’ perspectives in the same paragraph.<\/p>\n Number two: Only one of the characters was remotely likable and had a compelling arc. That was Martin, the upstairs neighbor who suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. As you might have guessed, the upstairs neighbor was not one of the main characters. All the main characters were needy, whiny, pathetic, and\/or generally uninteresting.<\/p>\n Number three: The author put all the characters’ thoughts in italics…and there were a lot of them. Here’s a sample: “Martin stood holding the letter. The worst thing has happened. <\/em>He could not take it in.\u00a0 She’s gone.<\/em> She would not come back.”<\/p>\n Take out italics; a little shift in tense…Presto change-o! Tell me it’s not better thus: “Martin stood holding the letter. The worst thing had happened. <\/em>He could not take it in. She was gone. She would not come back.”<\/p>\n Number four: The “twist” was predictable. It had been done better and, more importantly, twenty-five years ago<\/em> in a Young Adult novel I read called Stranger with My Face<\/em> by Lois Duncan.<\/p>\n Number five: The denouement was wholly unsatisfying. I’m thinking she was under deadline and wrote the last 30 pages in 30 minutes. “OK, this one has a baby, the guy leaves her, so-and-so gets a boyfriend, and what’s-her-name finds a crow to fly away on. Done! Whew!”<\/p>\n I could give you more reasons why I hated this book, but I hope that gives you enough to go on.<\/p>\n Thanks for asking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My book club just read “Her Fearful Symmetry” by Audrey Niffenegger. I hated it and will, forthwith, enumerate the reasons why. Number one: Third person omniscient point-of-view sucks anyway, and Niffeneggar executed it particularly badly in this novel, sometimes writing from different characters’ perspectives in the same paragraph. Number two: Only one of the characters … Continue reading Do Not Read This Book<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ask-the-ab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}