Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)

Audrey Niffenegger's richly imagined debut, The Time Traveler's Wife, took the impossible and made it plausible, transforming a silly premise into a moving romance. Her follow-up takes the impossible and makes it ridiculous. The story revolves around two sets of twins: Elspeth and Edie, and Edie's daughters, Julia and Valentina. When Elspeth dies and leaves her apartment to the younger sisters, they find themselves entangled with an OCD-suffering shut-in, Elspeth's lover, and Elspeth's ghost. But it's not just the phantom who lacks life. Her Fearful Symmetry's characters feel too spectral, and their insane solutions to relatively simple problems make them hard to care about. C+

See all of this week's reviews