The Time Traveler's Wife in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

May 01, 2011 Jessica rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story, the story of a woman named Clare who first meets her future husband when she is six, and a man named Henry who first meets Clare when she is twenty and has known him nearly all her life. Henry is displaced in time, sometimes falling out of his linear life to experience moments in his past or his future, or before he is born or after he has died. Thus he is 36 when six-year-old Clare meets him for the first time, yet he doesn't know her when they first me The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story, the story of a woman named Clare who first meets her future husband when she is six, and a man named Henry who first meets Clare when she is twenty and has known him nearly all her life. Henry is displaced in time, sometimes falling out of his linear life to experience moments in his past or his future, or before he is born or after he has died. Thus he is 36 when six-year-old Clare meets him for the first time, yet he doesn't know her when they first meet in his present when he is 28.

The story is remarkably well done, easy to follow and even easier to get wrapped up in. I must make a couple of concessions, the first of which is that in comparison to the book I was working on immediately previous to it (The Language Instinct) very many books might have seemed Very Easy To Get Wrapped Up In, and the second is that while I used to be someone who never cried at stories, it means less than it used to to say that I sobbed my way through the last dozen pages, which is indeed the case. I probably only have a couple of years left before I start weeping openly at commercials, but at this point I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of books that have made me cry so far this year. Pretty sure.

The tragedy in The Time Traveler's Wife is written between the lines from the very beginning, but I think what makes the first half of the book better than the remainder is that it's still easy to believe that things could end some other way. Later in the book it draws closer to what you knew was going to happen all along, so it's a little less magical, but I did already admit that the ending got me pretty worked up just the same, didn't I?

The Time Traveler's Wife gets bonus points for being set in my immediate neighborhood in Chicago, so it's full of little landmarks that had special meaning for me. There's an immediate kinship when you read a book and know the geography so intimately.

It also gets bonus points for excellent and strategic use of quotes. Niffenegger quotes Rilke heavily and makes me want to dig out my Rilke books and buy up all his other poetry besides. She works in skillful allusions to The Odyssey and makes the ending much richer for its parallel to Penelope and Odysseus. She could have written chapters more and still not expressed those dozens of years as well as she did with that one final quote.

I'm not really sure that The Time Traveler's Wife is a five-star book, and if I had read it after a string of other decent fiction, it might have just gotten four, but it was such an enjoyable consumption that I feel I'd be doing it an injustice not to give it all five. ...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Melle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: romance, chicago, time-travel

The love story between the protagonists rang emotionally true for me, so much so that I was envious of their relative success as a couple, heartbroken when I read passages that I somehow mentally assigned to favorite ex-beau/love-of-my-life, and hopeful against futile hope that the time-space continuum doesn't matter when it comes to true love.

Really, the book is good but not great. There are enough allusions to major schools of thought in philosophy and physical science, but some of it just did ...more

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Jun 08, 2008 Samira rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, novels

I listened to most of this on an audio book while driving from Atlanta to just north of Boston. The book was great and certainly made the miles go much faster. (I quite liked the recording as well--it was done in two voices.) I found the characters interesting and engaging and the story nothing like what I would have expected.

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