From the Bookshelf of 2015 Reading Challenge [Closed]…

The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger

Discussion: . Week 2: Romance

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. Week 2: Romance

* Week 2: Introduction
By Jessica · 43 posts · 618 views

last updated Feb 03, 2015 01:13PM

* Week 2: Progress Post
By Jessica · 54 posts · 221 views

last updated Dec 30, 2015 12:26PM

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What Members Thought

Jan 08, 2013 Marija rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: i-own, read-in-croatian, time-travel

Well what can I say besides that I loved it. This book made laugh, almost cry and happy. Someone would say that a book where two people met and fall in love and have happy life (more or less) is cliche but this book wasn't. Clare knows Henry her whole life but Henry meets Clare when he is 28. How is that possible? No, Clare isn't a stalker. Just read and find out. It's a book about love, family, affairs, broken hearts.
I have to admit that it was confusing at beginning.
This is the second book wh ...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Audrey rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I see the appeal, but I just did not like it. Reading it was just unpleasant, so much so that I read about the first two-hundred pages and skimmed to the end, which is something I almost never do.

So let's start with what was good:

-The writing itself, the prose, was well done, and the author creates lots of pretty backdrops for the action.

-Kind of similar, but Niffenegger was very good at injecting realism in to a fantasy premise. And yeesh, I just kept imagining the big messy chart I'd have t I see the appeal, but I just did not like it. Reading it was just unpleasant, so much so that I read about the first two-hundred pages and skimmed to the end, which is something I almost never do.

So let's start with what was good:

-The writing itself, the prose, was well done, and the author creates lots of pretty backdrops for the action.

-Kind of similar, but Niffenegger was very good at injecting realism in to a fantasy premise. And yeesh, I just kept imagining the big messy chart I'd have to make to keep all the time jumps straight if I were writing this.

Here is what keeps me from liking it:

-I just could not connect with the characters. Which is really a feat, if you think about it, because it's nearly five hundred pages of just their lives. I don't know what it was. Maybe that they were so privelidged and rich, maybe just that they didn't seem very nice, maybe it's just my thing. But I just couldn't get myself to like them or sympathize with them. So then when all the bad things happened (view spoiler) I wasn't really sad, my reaction was more, "Ew, I wish I hadn't read the description of that."

-It was just too long. And I think the premise kind of makes the author write herself in to a corner, because the time travel makes things repedative and involves a lot of revisiting and stuff, and it FEELS repedative, too. I think it could have done with having a few hundred pages cut.

-The stereotype-ness of the minor characters made me kind of uncomfortable. Especially the "Mammy"-esque cook at Clare's house. I don't know, maybe that's consistent with real people the author had met, but to me, as a reader, it was like "Really? She's writing in the 21st century here, right?"

All in all, I see why some people like it, but for me it was a lot of pages of depressing with not a lot of payoff. ...more

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