The Time Traveler’s Wife

Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Genre: magical realism

PopSugar Challenge Prompt: A book everyone but you has read (it has over 1 million ratings on Goodreads)

I have no idea why people latched on to this book. How in the world did this book earn over a million ratings? It’s a good book but nothing spectacular. I definitely don’t get the hype. It was creative, sure, but I won’t read it again and only gave it four stars. Honestly, the book creeped me out at times. An older man looking at a child (his future wife, but still….) with googly eyes. Eh, just didn’t work for me.

From Goodreads: Audrey Niffenegger’s innovative debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals—steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

The concept was really interesting. Poor Henry, at any moment, will disappear leaving his clothes and any object (like a tooth filling) behind. Though, it’s quite convenient to the plot that he has to learn to steal clothes, pick locks, and turn into an escape artist. And he goes back in time to familiar locations, his childhood home, his work place, and his wife’s childhood home. He sees her throughout her entire life, starting when she’s six. Their love is one for the storybooks, and Clare is a great character. But this book was just good for me. I can’t really explain why I didn’t love it, but I’ve definitely read better love stories.