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But Her Fearful Symmetry is not a book of great emotional force, not the way Time Traveler's Wife was. It's marred by a wrenching plot twist that, to me, sails way beyond the bounds of plausibility. And there's ultimately something strangely toylike about the little world of Her Fearful Symmetry. Everything in it--the apartment, the cemetery, the two sets of twins, the crossword-composing, obsessive-compulsive classicist upstairs--is fashioned with such twiddly bespoke neatness, such fussy perfection, that the whole affair is like a tragedy performed by exquisite dolls: lovely and precious and lifeless. Only the spectral Elspeth feels real. And what does it say about a novel that the one character who feels alive is a ghost?