This book had a huge premise and even though it was long, it still read like each storyline had been truncated in order to fit between the covers. I can't say i enjoyed the experience of reading this novel. The twins were strange and their behaviour didn't feel plausible, and by that I mean neither set of twins were compelling (yes, TWO sets of twins appear in this book). There were notes of a twisted Romeo and Juliet in the ending, and that had legs as a horror, but instead the teeth were pulled from that and we had a character called Robert finally completing his thesis only to abandon his lover and their child. 

Ok listen, Robert was in love with a woman called Elspeth (who is a twin), and she dies at the beginning and leaves her flat to her nieces, who are twins, and who are actually her daughters, only they don't know that and neither does Robert. The twins come to London. One of them (Valentina) falls in love with Robert and he fancies her too. The twins are like really attached to each other and the delicate feeble one feels trapped so she gets Elspeth (her ghost aunt/mother) to remove her soul so she can be separate from her overbearing twin. So she "dies". 

[If she'd have waited ✋ a measly six months, she could have had her independence WITHOUT killing herself. She was going to inherit a bunch of money and could have just bogged off and left the Overbearing Twin]

Then Robert takes her body out of her coffin and Elspeth is supposed to put her soul back in, but Elspeth goes into her body instead and shacks up with Robert. And then gets pregnant. And then Robert feels guilty, finishes his thesis, and vanishes and we don't find out what happens to him. Valentina just exists as a ghost in Highgate Cemetery and never gets to do anything she wanted to do because she's dead. Her twin is miserable as hell but manages to get a boyfriend (the son of a man with OCD who she kissed and tried to sleep with and also secretly dosed with medication so he could pluck up the courage to leave the flat and go to Amsterdam where his wife went when she couldn't deal with his OCD anymore.)

Oh and there was a switcheroo with the twins because Elspeth was paranoid so she got her twin to test the loyalty of her lover and in doing so the twin got pregnant so they switched the babies and - listen, there was a lot going on in this book. 

The ending was depressing. Niffenegger does this. She writes nice books and then gives them horrible endings. I wasn't impressed. And the writing wasn't as sexy as the Time Traveller's Wife either. At least that had interesting descriptions of paper making. 

Oh. She also didn't manage to evoke London successfully. I felt like I was in Chicago when I read TTTW, but this London felt fake as hell. And I've been spending a lot of time in London recently, so I'd know.