by Audrey Niffenegger

I had a slow start on this book because I hate, hate, HATE present tense writing and had trouble getting into it as a result. Then I decided to persevere because everyone says it's so good and by the time I passed the first 50 pages, I started getting caught up in the story enough that I didn't notice as much. I won't say that it didn't throw me out of the story a few times, but the time travel aspects were original and kept my interest enough to decide to finish it.

One thing I found very original was that the time traveller had no control of when or where he travelled. The book explains how and why it starts and how it works so I won't spoil that, but it made for some interesting situations. The rules also didn't allow him to take anything with him, so every time he moved through time he appeared in a new time and place naked and never knew when he was until he found out by asking someone or finding some indication like a newspaper. You can imagine the awkward situations that led to. Like in the Terminator movies, but this time traveller couldn't bully clothes off people and had to beg, steal or scrounge for them.

The convoluted coming and going of the time traveller as he visits his wife in her young days is very well done until halfway through when we get to their wedding. I could see what was meant to have happened, but I didn't feel it was executed as well. The various events and situations kept interest up to that point very well, despite the present tense writing which continued to irk me every time I picked up the book to read some more. Is it possible to love a story and hate the way it's written? This is a first for me.

There is sort of a lull after the wedding where ordinary domestic adjustments are only occasionally interrupted by time travel incidents. I found the story slowed down, but I had too much invested by then and wanted to see how it ended. There was some interestingly plausible biological exposition on the cause of Henry's time travel, but otherwise nothing overly exciting for quite a while.

The action picked up a little but then turned depressing and I found that events were predicted too far ahead of time so that there were no real surprises. There were also a few loose ends, like one of the time traveller's appearances that should have had significance but was never explained. Previous instances always came full circle eventually so that you learn what happened, but not this one. There was also one major inconsistency where one of the instances of time travel included detailed description of clothing but when it came up later, there was no opportunity to obtain clothing before he was gone again.

I really didn't like the last 150 or so pages. The ending was pretty much already told and it was all very depressing. I'm glad I've read the book, but it won't be a re-read for me, ever. There was enough of interest to make it worthwhile and give me some new thoughts on the theory of time travel and how it might work, at least in speculation, but I'm definitely ready to move on from this to something completely different.

So though I thought the ending was quite good, I had some issues with certain aspects of this book. All in all I saw love as a dangerous thing to be in since it seems to not work out for anyone that is in "love" in this one. And the first part of the book takes a while to get going. It helps that Audrey Niffenegger takes the time to include headers that show the date and age of Henry and Clare so you can keep things straight. A very strong three stars. 

We have a young girl Clare who is 6 that meets a 40 year old man named Henry. Henry is naked and tells Clare that he is a time traveler. He will see her repeatedly while she is growing up and without Clare realizing it, she's met the man she will one day marry. The book then follows Clare and Henry through the years until they finally meet up in her present and then walks through their marriage and the difficulties with Henry time traveling. The book speaks of loneliness throughout and even when Clare is near Henry, she's constantly bracing herself for him to leave at any moment. 

Clare was a bit hard to take once some things are revealed. No spoilers, but she's a terrible friend. She loves Henry and that's all she cares about. She doesn't worry about the issues they will have with him time traveling. She loves him and is going to be with him no matter what. Though Clare's art is important to her, it often feels secondary to her love of Henry and her inability to say no to him. Why Clare tells certain people about Henry's time travel baffles me too. I would have thought she was a liar and stayed away from her. 

Henry is pretty much a jerk I thought. He is rude and sarcastic though he loves Clare. He ends up becoming enmeshed in her life and becomes friends with her friends though one wonders why when he realizes what is going on with the character of Gomez. We hear about Henry's love of books, but I was pretty shocked that he barely seems to read. I guess if one is time traveling, you are just focused on not being killed when you pop up naked with no money or clothing. He and his father don't have a relationship since his father is still mourning his dead mother and has no love left to give Henry. Henry seems obsessive about sex with Clare (and she does about him too) that one wonders if these two ever had conversations after they meet in the present day. 

The secondary characters have their own tales of love which doesn't speak too highly of it we have lost love (Henry's father and the character of Kimy), broken hearts (Clare's mother), obsessive love (Gomez) and unrequited love (Charisse and Ingrid). This whole book screams out that love that is not painful is not worth having. 

The writing at times is lovely and others just choppy. I think once we get past a certain time period (no spoilers) we are just waiting for the inevitable to happen. The flow isn't that great to start with either. I think some things could have been cut, but that's just me.

The setting of the book moves from the 1960s to the year 2050 something. I can't recall right now. We have Clare and Henry mostly in Illinois though she is born and raised in Michigan with Henry of course doing pop by's here and there. 

The ending though was sad, but it moved me. I don't know if I could wait, but we get to see a future Clare and wonder how her life unfolded. 

“When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain before you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses.”

In “The Time Traveler's Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

I cannot bring myself to assign a star rating to this one, as I am somewhat conflicted about this book.  I'm a sucker for time-travel, I found the premise interesting, and I found myself pulled through the narrative wanting to know how everything resolves.  But there were also aspects I found troubling.

Like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Henry DeTamble comes unstuck in time.  It begins when he is quite young (age five), and he never has control over when it happens or where in time he goes.  He meets Clare Abshire when he is 28 and she is 20.  However, at that point, Clare has known Henry since she was six.  This is because when Henry is 36 (and has been married to Clare for five years),* he begins traveling back to Clare's childhood.  The versions of Henry Clare already knows at that point are ages 36 through 43.  From age-28 Henry's perspective, she is a beautiful stranger who is inexplicably drawn to him and unsettlingly familiar with him.  From age-20 Clare's perspective, it's been two years since her last "Henry" visit, and she has been waiting impatiently to find him in his own timeline.

So, one of the troubling aspects for me is that the many encounters between Clare (age 6-18) and Henry (age 36- 32-43) feel a whole lot like child grooming.  In the early years of her life, he's a friend who helps her with her homework, but he also lets slip that in his timeline they're married, so there is always this air of inevitability that he is her future husband.  I'm queasily reminded of Stephenie Meyer's concept of "imprinting" in Breaking Dawn, when Jacob Black  imprints upon infant Renesmee Cullen.  With imprinting, Meyer takes great pains to specify that in the early years, the relationship is not sexual, that the imprinter is everything the imprintee needs him to be--babysitter, tutor, best friend--before she's of age and the relationship becomes sexual.

Even though Henry insists on waiting until Clare is 18 before having sexual intercourse, Clare begins pushing toward a sexual relationship at a disturbing early-teen age, going for kisses and inappropriate touching  The Henry that she loses her virginity to is 41 years old, and I couldn't help thinking of this as cheating on the age-33 version of Clare.  This type of scenario--Henry having sex with other-age Clares--happens at other times in the narrative, as well.  And neither Henry nor Clare seems disturbed by it.  At one point, one of the middle-aged Henries worries that he might be shaping Clare's life.  No, duh.  Grooming.  I really wish the author had simply NOT had Henry traveling into Clare's childhood, and finding a different way for them to form their bond.

There are also the sex scenes themselves.  I will state up front that I am not a romance reader.  I usually don't enjoy graphic sex scenes, mostly because I think the majority of  authors don't manage to do them well.  In the case of this book, the tone and language of the sex scenes felt incongruent with the rest of the narrative, using porny words that didn't fit with the word choices of the rest of the book.

But despite my misgivings, I cared about the characters, wished them to resolve their problems, and actually got teary a couple of times.  Emotions!

Some other random observations:  The type of time-travel in the book is the sort where everything is already settled; the future has already happened, and nothing the time-traveler does alters what is going to happen.  All of his/her acts are already baked into the timeline.  This came out in interesting ways; however, I do prefer the type of time travel where it is possible to alter outcomes.

When Henry time travels, he cannot bring anything with him.  Therefore, he always lands completely naked, without money, and ravenous.  Much of his attention is devoted to getting clothes, money, and food, and because of that he resorts to pick-pocketing, lock-picking/theft, and other illegal acts.  There is a scene where an adult Henry teaches one of his childhood selves how to pick pockets.  (Yes, his various selves interact with one another.)

An aside particular to the audio narration:  In one of the scenes between middle-aged Henry and child Clare, Henry teachers Clare a phrase in French, noting that her French pronunciation is "already better" than his.  But the male narrator, when speaking French, has passable French pronunciation.  Much later, the female narrator delivers some lines in French, and her pronunciation is not good.  I had to struggle to figure out which words she was trying to say.  If being able to pronounce French well is a character trait, you need to do your audio-casting accordingly, if actually speaking French will be part of the performance.

I read a sampling of reviews for this book on Goodreads, and several reviewers of the text version complained that Henry and Clare "sounded" the same in their narratives.  This is certainly one advantage of the audio version--no mistaking the female "Clare" voice for the male "Henry" voice.

**Update:  I realize I goofed.  Although from Clare's perspective, the first meeting with Henry occurs when she is six and Henry is 36, from Henry's perspective, the youngest he is when dipping into Clare's youth is 32.  Which means he was only married for two when he started all that, which hits me as even ickier somehow.