Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife

[Lucybird]

Yes, I've read it (all in the shop, oops) it's really good and I still want to own it.

[sillypants124]

The Time Traveler’s Wife

 

Synopsis:

 

A Most untraditional love story, this is a celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Claire Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Claire’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bond of love.

 

I was very intrigued by the “appeal” of the book based from a friend’s recommendation and a lot of the rave reviews and the fact it’s a fictional “love story” and not a “romance” novel. I was disappointed with this book. I do not know if it was because I had high expectations or not. I do Praise the author Audrey Niffenegger for how she tackles time traveling with the main male character Henry other than that I did not care for this story. The Character deveolpment lacked in my opinion because there were events that happened to both of the character's lives and we do not get any information on how this shaped them as individuals and as a couple which resulted in a "monotone" character that never grew or slighty grew. Henry to me was a predator, very selfish, manipulative, never remorseful, and he had a lot of issues and I really think if he had a therapist he could have resolved some of his issues. Claire to me was spoiled, selfish, naive, and as well never remorseful.

 

We follow the life of Henry and Claire and how they meet. Henry thirty-eight Meets Claire as a six year old girl and we get to see her grow up through various stages of her life with Henry popping in and out until she finally finds Henry during the present day. It can be confusing, but yes there are actually two meetings of these characters. As the book progresses we start getting to know more of the relationship between the two main characters. Their relationship to me is not love but more of lust. Henry was already in a relationship and in love with Ingrid when Claire came along. Yes, Henry’s relationship with Ingrid was a bit messed up, but it could have been fixed with therapy. Henry just went from one extreme to another extreme of a relationship. Henry and Claire never fought but all they did was have sex. There were quite a few graphic sexual scenes within the story and I honestly believe this did not help to convey these two characters were in “love” especially when Claire slept with her friend’s husband while married to Henry. Even though Claire did betray her husband what I did not like so much was how the author just dismisses this act and not delve more into how this affected any of the characters and continues on as nothing happened. Again, this kind of thing happens more than once so it was hard to feel any compassion and feel sorry for the characters even when the book ends.

 

The ending felt like a cop out to have a “happy ending” to this story; but I did not feel happy. I felt the characters got what was coming to them and overall I became angry because I thought the author had a great idea but the execution was not there even in the writting. There is a lot of language in this book and it may have helped show the type of character we are dealing with but I felt it was a little over board, and the grammatical errors and that's saying something from someone that has bad grammer - but the stylistic of the writing was very Jane Austin-esque. I wouldn't recommend this book to just anyone.

 

1/10

 

(Read March 2010)

 

Side Note: I know there was a reading group of this on here awhile back but I thought I would give my review on this book. Hopefully I did not go overboard myself and gave too much detail away and did an okay job reviewing this book.

 

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Brandon