Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

I recently finished another excellent book, "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger (the author of "The Time Traveler's Wife", which I have not yet read, but will be after this latest book!). Here's the back cover synopsis:

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons and other luminaries are buried. Julie and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including - perhaps - their aunt.

Now, reading this back cover again (after having read the book), it doesn't do it justice. This book draws you in with a series of twists and turns that you definitely don't see coming. It touches on life after death, the bond between sisters and what people will do for love. This book is great vacation read - it makes you think but quickly becomes a book that you won't want to put down!

In other news, this weekend was pretty fun. LONG but fun. On Friday I had started to not feel well, but sucked it up for an evening out with Kimi, Mike and Kayla. We had a lovely dinner at the Olive Garden down in Folsom. Later that night I started to feel really yucky, so I spent most of Saturday morning trying to rest because we had Matt (Mike's cousin) and Megan's wedding in Sonoma Saturday evening. It was a really long drive... we hit traffic just West of Davis and pretty much sat in it the rest of the way there. Thankfully we had left early... we made it there about 10 minutes before the wedding was supposed to start! Megan looked beautiful... but since I wasn't feeling well, I didn't take too many pictures. In fact, the only one I that had her in it was during the ball and chain tradition:

Yeah, you read that right... apparently it's a Blankenheim right of passage to be tackled at your wedding and shackled with an honest-to-God cement ball and chain. It's happened at all of them and the key ends up in random places, like the bride's garter. Here's Mike and I after the ceremony:

We decided to drive home after the reception, so we didn't end up getting here until just after midnight... this morning I actually slept until almost 8am! I spent the rest of the day reading (I've moved on to a trashy romance novel... I have to slip those in every now and then) and napping while Mike watched golf and napped. It's been a really long time since I've had an entire day to lounge in bed... it was awesome! Next up, some Sunday night football and an early bed time to kick whatever this weird little bug is!