That climax, however, for me personally, reduced HFS from a superb book and instant favourite to a good book that I have ambivalent feelings about. Several of the main characters start a course of action that is not only ill-conceived and doomed from the start (as was the earlier course of action between Elspeth and Edie, truth be told; I could not truly understand either, but maybe that's just me), but also shockingly and unwarrantedly cruel. While Niffenegger does not shy away from the consequences of those actions and devotes ample attention to the complicated feelings they cause in both the perpetrators (in the broadest sense of the word) and the victims, I found it hard to care very much about the resolution after such a twist...

In conclusion, I would say that Her Fearful Symmetry is a more than worthy successor to The Time Traveler's Wife, and that Niffenegger's writing if anything has improved...

In terms of characters and their stories, Niffenegger shows that she can weave a plot involving a significantly larger cast while still making the reader care for all of those characters, although perhaps Martin's story is slightly too detached from the main plotline. My only major point of criticism is that climax, but other readers may well find it less objectionable.