“What if, what if, what?” is the refrain I often hear in my head as I ponder the limitless possibilities that could result from life’s choices. What if we moved to a small town? What if I went back to corporate? What if this relationship (or that) was different? And then I return to some sage advice Angela Jane Fountas gave me once, “You only get seven out of ten of what you want. You can change which seven, but you’ll never get ten.” Fitting, then, that what struck me recently about her gorgeous new book Another Kind of Symmetry is that she’d found the perfect way to explore and inhabit life’s myriad what ifs.
The book centers on twin sisters, Agni and Effie who live with their Greek-born parents in Astoria, Queens while going to college. Effie is wilder and Agni quieter, and the fact that they are twins already gives us a chance to explore two ways of blooming from the same circumstance. But because of their heritage and close family ties, we get two other what ifs: living the diaspora or returning home and whether to embrace the city or the country.
Another Kind of Symmetry begins with Agni and Effie at their grandmother’s grave in Greece, five years after she died and six years after Agni decided to stay in their ancestral village after coming for her grandfather’s funeral. They are there to dig up their grandmother’s bones after her soul has finally transitioned to the afterlife—this being just one of many chances we the readers get to see touches of Greek life that we may never have encountered before. This scene provides an early sense of the divergence of the sisters’ paths, but just enough to provide a framework for the treat of a story Fountas is about to unfold for us.
This is not a book I want to unfold for you, because one of the beauties of the way the book is constructed is in how it consistently presents us with the two sides of something and leaves us to plumb our feelings (all while enjoying a great story). The richly-drawn characters experience love and loss as they are trying to figure out their own lives and all the while the world changes around them in locations are as carefully detailed as the characters. Themes of personal identity mix with gentrification and how to love someone you don’t understand.
This is also not a book to read quickly, as much as you may find yourself wanting to. Regardless of whether you are a country mouse or a city mouse, I strongly urge you to take the time to sit with Agni and Effie and what they teach you about who you may want to be.
As for me, I may never have the fireplace I so wanted when we were looking for a house all those years ago, but I spent the last couple of weeks harvesting and processing plums, apples, and tomatoes from the garden of the place we have made our home. And I have the memories of watching Stinky and Dirty with my son when he was tiny, listening to those trucks sing a refrain whose wisdom he was probably too young to understand at the time but one that reminds me every day that everything is a choice.
If you pick up your copy of Another Kind of Symmetry from Bookshop.org, I get a commission.
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