Archive for Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Posted in Fiction, Lisa with tags , , , , on January 17, 2008 by Lisa

Wow. Just Wow. How does someone possibly come up with this stuff? People have been telling me to read The Time Traveler’s Wife for months, and I was a bit intimidated by the popularity of it. Just look at my review of Twilight to see how that turned out last time for me! (Please note the lovely comment that review got!)

Here’s the summary of the book:

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger’s cinematic storytelling that makes the novel’s unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

Everyone was right-  this book is so good!  If it’s on your list and you keep putting it off, move it up to the front. It’s not science fiction-y at all. There was only one incident that made me question how the time travel followed the rules she had set and I was able to figure out the answer.   Henry is the perfect hero and clearly madly in love with Claire.  I had a few minor quibbles with just how many people knew about his condition, but other than that, no problems with the book at all. I finished it last weekend, and I’m still thinking about it all the time, which hasn’t happened to me for a while now (A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Book Thief being the most notable from 2007.)  It seems odd that the second book I read this year will be one of the best, but it seems likely that it’s going to happen that way.  If you haven’t read it yet, or find yourself intimidated, please, go get it now. It’s really worth it.  If you started it already, and got a bit confused by the beginning, stick with it- you eventually get into the flow of it.

 Review cross posted at Books. Lists. Life.