Guest Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

Please help me welcome my very first guest reviewer, my almost 15 year old daughter Abby. :) She's a voracious reader who averages about 3 books a week. She began reading at an early age and has now been reading for well over a decade. Some of her favorite authors are Garth Nix, Madeleine L'Engle and Mercedes Lackey. I have been asking her to do a guest review for months. I've tried simply asking bugging, gentle persuasion threatening, offering a token of my appreciation bribery but nothing worked.

I was shocked when she told me that she had written a review and if I wanted to I could post it on the blog. The majority of her reading is Young Adult so I was expecting a YA review. I don't read much YA so I thought it would be nice to have some YA reviews. But in typical teenager fashion she gives me a review not for a YA novel but for an adult romance. She had to read it and write the review for her English class so this probably isn't going to happen often. :) I haven't read The Time Traveler's Wife yet, it's on my TBR pile but I will get to it. Enjoy!




Title: The Time Traveler's Wife
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Time Travel Romance
Published: July 2004

From the back cover ~

A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’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 bonds of love.

Usually, movies are major book-reading turnoffs for me. And romances aren’t really my thing, either. I hadn’t even heard of Time Traveler’s Wife until after the movie came out, and I was rather skeptical at first, but I wound up devouring the entire book over the course of a weekend.

There’s really no genre for this book: it’s that fantastically unique. It could, perhaps, be called a ‘sci-fi romance’. It’s almost a paranormal romance, except for the fact that there is a scientific explanation for Henry’s condition – another thing that makes this book incredibly unique. Traditionally, the ability to time travel is discovered / created somewhere in the future (along with flying cars and the Fountain of Youth) and used via machines to aggrandize the knowledge of the scientific community / humankind as a whole by viewing events in the past for better understanding, and / or altering the course of History Itself to make life better.

. . . What.

I won’t even begin on how little sense that makes, instead turning to an explanation of the time travel that occurs within Time Traveler’s Wife. Henry has only marginal control over when he travels; it usually occurs when he is stressed, so keeping himself calm does help, but it doesn’t stop him from travelling. He has no choice over the location he’ll go to, or the time at which he arrives, or when he goes back; and he can’t interfere in the path of History Itself.

And all the while, poor Clare is left in the Present (or her present, at least), waiting for Henry, worrying, wondering. Unlike her husband, Clare is a completely normal person, who does not time-travel at random and therefore does not generally run the risk of dying in a foreign time and place. She loves Henry, despite probably sometimes thinking he’s an idiot for taking so many risks, and is willing to wait for him for incredibly long periods of time – multiple decades in one case.

The bond the two share – stretching from Clare’s childhood at age six, all the way until their deaths, despite the time-travelling – is incredibly touching, in a way I can’t quite put into words. Maybe it’s just the fact that Niffenegger’s writing is so convincing – there’s a very “this could be happening to someone I know” feel. It’s real. And that’s what makes it so entrancing.

Rating: A