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| The Time Traveler's Wife | 
 enlarge | Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $2.78
You Save: $11.22 (80%)
New (93) Used (400) Collectible (12) from $2.78
Avg. Customer Rating:  1675 reviews
Sales Rank: 326
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 560
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 015602943X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780156029438
ASIN: 015602943X
Publication Date: May 27, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. ORDERS SHIP WITHIN 1-2 BUSINESS DAYS. MAY CONTAINT HIGHLIGHTING AND/OR WRITING. ALL USED BOOK ARE LISTED AS ACCEPTABLE BUT MAY BE GOOD/VERY GOOD/LIKE NEW.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Did not live up to the hype August 2, 2005
54 out of 61 found this review helpful
I was prepared to love this book based upon the recommendations of several friends. Alas, I seem to be in the minority, but I did not find this book a compelling read for several reasons. The chief problem I encountered was that as a mother, I was disturbed by the relationship of young Clare and adult Henry. Over the years, he regularly pops up naked in her yard and assuages her fear by telling her he is her future husband. This behavior is a little too close to that of a sophisticated pedophile for me to ever find it amusing, cute or romantic.
My second problem is that the book is both too long and too short. It is too long in that I felt the ending with the negative problems Henry undergoes with his health were merely melodrama for the sake of melodrama. It is too short in that I never felt that I knew Henry or Clare well at all.
The sexuality was never more, IMO, than standard tab-in-slot sex -- I never really felt any love between them in the sex scenes.
Even though I am a long-time time-travel lover, I never quite understood the nuances of when Henry could affect the present/past and when he could not. Frankly, it often seemed to me that Henry was creating self-fulfilling prophecies that worked to his benefit. For example, by telling Clare that he was her future husband, he effectively ensured that she would not seriously date anyone else, thereby leaving the field clear for him in the future. And the author's choice of having Clare's one high school date turn into a battering seemed like an excessively hurtful way to teach Clare a lesson -- that she should wait for Henry. Another example was his telling her that they would meet again in her old age, no doubt effectively negating any notion of moving on to another man.
In the end, I was perplexed about WHY Clare kept waiting for Henry -- he didn't seem worth waiting for. And finally, I disliked the author's occasional use of trashy language, which was unnecessary.
Lack of depth ruins an intriguing concept January 28, 2005
53 out of 60 found this review helpful
Unlike a lot of the other critics of this book, I didn't have a problem with the idea that a six-year-old Clare could fall in love with a forty-year-old Henry. I didn't have a problem with Henry breaking into places or all that other stuff either. But I had MANY problems with this book.
One of the main problems I have with this book is brilliantly exemplified on page 392 -- the date, September 11th, 2001:
"Henry says, 'Wake up, Clare.' I open my eyes. The television picture swerves around. A city street. A sky. A white skyscraper on fire. An airplane, toylike, slowly flies into the second white tower. Silent flames shoot up. Henry turns up the volume. 'Oh my God,' says the voice of the television. 'Oh my God.'"
... And then this event is never referred to ever again. The story does not take place in New York, nor does 9/11 bear any kind of noticeable emotional impact upon any of the characters in any way. And yet this paragraph is in the book anyway. Why? Good question -- I'd like to know too. But this is only the most typified example of the author's compulsive habit of putting in useless subplots and shallow tangents into the book for no particular reason at all. Examples of this are littered throughout the book. Henry's mother died when he was only a young boy -- this apparently had such a traumatic effect upon him that he is constantly involuntarily sent back to the moment of her death to witness it again -- Henry even goes so far as to say that it's almost as if all his time traveling REVOLVES around this one event. Okay, fine. I can accept that -- there's a lot of potential in an idea like that. But where does the author take this? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. We are left with the knowledge that Harry sometimes relives his mother's death, that it bothers him especially on Christmas Eve, but otherwise it has no bearing upon the plot, and even more frighteningly, upon Henry himself. The fact of his mother's death is treated like trivia knowledge rather than emotional trauma. Another example is Gomez's apparent harbored affections for Clare. Not only does this information come ridiculously out of left field, but it is never developed. It's alluded to perhaps twice, and then Gomez comes on to Clare ONCE and then that's it, the story moves along as if it never happened, and it has no bearing upon anything.
This shallowness unfortunately mars the entire story, because it does not stop at the inclusion of shallowly developed subplots, but it goes into and ruins nearly every sphere of the book. Shallowly developed subplots is a problem, but shallowly developed characters is a much bigger one. The only characters who have any development at all are Henry and Clare, and neither of them have very much depth either. Clare is patient, kind, sexy, beautiful, loyal, artistic, rich, good in bed, etc. etc. As for the secondary characters, they were so flagrantly underdeveloped that I found myself mixing up names quite frequently, because there was nothing in the characters to make me care, nor to help me differentiate. Gomez was known to me as "that guy who smokes cigarettes." Ingrid was known as "the suicidal." Charisse was "the girl who dates the guy who smokes cigarettes." It's not that I'm a lazy reader -- it's that Audrey Niffenegger is a lazy writer -- she uses things like cigarette smoking to define a character, but then that's it, that's as far as the depth goes. Every character has the exact same vocabulary, the exact same voice -- I often felt the dialogues were the author writing out conversations with herself as she tried to sound witty. "Tell me Clare, why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?" "Because he's really, really good in bed." That's supposed to be a joke, and that's fine, but so much of the dialogue is written this way: trite, witty, one-liners, and they never say anything about the character involved, because every character speaks in the exact same way (unless you count Nell and Kimy, both of whom I considered to be just racial stereotypes).
I hate to take this further but then even the romance itself, the most important thing in the whole book, was yes, shallow. The quote mentioned above was supposed to be a joke, but the more the book went along, the more I began to suspect that the line was meant to be taken seriously. Clare first meets Henry when she is but a little girl, and throughout the course of her childhood and adolesence she sporadically meets this older Henry and falls in love with him. By the time they are married, it is surely meant to be. Now, I did not find this idea to be creepy as some did, I thought it had a lot of potential, but the writer never shows us WHY she would fall in love with a naked forty-year-old man -- it's almost as if Clare simply falls in love with Henry because he happens to show up every now and again, and it doesn't make any sense. Henry, before he meets Clare is a hard-edged, drug-using, womanizing punk, but then the moment he meets Clare in Chicago and she basically tells him "we're meant to be," he magically reforms himself, throws away his old life and habits, accepts what she tells him, falls in love overnight, but the reader is effectively shortchanged, almost as if the reader's meant to accept the romance on the grounds that it was meant to be, and that's that. Had the writer made the same effort to develop the romance as she did to put in countless unnecessarily graphic (and poorly written) sex scenes, then perhaps I'd feel differently.
Because of this shallowness, not only are the characters bland, not only is the romance unconvincing, but even the story itself runs itself around in circles over and over and over and over again. By the time the reader learns about the eventual fate of the characters, there is nothing left to do except wait for the author to get there already, and let me tell you, she takes her time.
I have nothing against long books, romance books, or time traveling sci-fi books. But I do have something against books that are sloppy, poorly edited, contrived, and worst of all, shallow. I wanted to like this book, and I had high hopes. To my disappointment, I left this book utterly unfulfilled.
 Love Conquers the Time-Space Continuum (Yawn!) June 9, 2005
53 out of 73 found this review helpful
Love conquers all. I should just stay away from these novels. I think they're lame when love is conquering something plausible -- like war, race, class, age, sexual orientation, career, mental illness, etc. But time travel? Is the author just that desperate?
My biggest problem with this book is that it isn't a novel. It's a collection of vignettes strung together and called a novel. Vignettes are the easiest things to write. This book reads like Assignment #1 in Writing 101. Well, Assignment #1 times 150.
Write a bunch of vignettes and string them together with a whacked timeline -- still isn't a novel. (However, vignettes are perfect for reading on the subway or bus, so if you're looking for a subway book, this may be perfect.)
Maybe the author thought vignettes were perfect for conveying the central character's (Henry's) time-fractured reality, like so many shards of a broken mirror. If so it doesn't work. The vignettes are perfect for one thing: writing short, intense scenes. They are extremely poor for developing character.
You'd think if your central character had to deal with time travel, he'd have considerable angst. Not Henry. Oh, it's damned inconvenient for him, but that's about as deep as he goes. What a waste of a plot device.
Then there's the yuck factor. Adolescent Henry time travels forward a couple of days so he can have sex with himself. Yuck. Henry time travels to Clare's back yard repeatedly, first meeting her when she's six but already knowing he'll marry her, so he thinks of her sexually even as a child. Yuck. Henry's mother is decapitated in front of him. Yuck. Adolescent Clare is raped by a sadistic 16-year-old who burns her breasts with cigarettes. Yuck. Yucky vignettes. There are more. I won't spoil it for you completely.
This doesn't even touch on the unreconciled inconsistencies of Henry's time traveling. If he can successfully project himself forward when he's a teenager, why is his time traveling so completely out of control the rest of the time? Why does he keep appearing in Clare's back yard, then suddenly it stops when they get married? How can he be present in the same time at two different ages (I think even Einsteinian physics would have a problem with that).
I didn't like it. Oh well.
 Could have been so much better September 29, 2003
52 out of 72 found this review helpful
I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. I wish it were an unpublished first draft in the hands of a skilled editor. This book has all the components of a truly great novel -- unfortunately for me, it just didn't measure up to its potential. I enjoy genre-busting novels -- and this one is certainly hard to pidgeonhole. Is it chick lit? Science fiction? Magical Realism? I wouldn't try so hard to classify it if I had been swept away, if the novel had a more masterful voice and engaging plotline. Although the book goes on for over five hundred pages, there is very little plot. And I mean VERY little. Henry and Clare love each other. And love each other some more. And keep loving each other through some fairly gruesome events that seem to take place for no other purpose than to allow Ms. Niffenegger to continue to describe how much they love each other. Throw in some detailed scenes including quirky, "intellectual" supporting charactes who serve virtually no purpose in furthering the story. Ms. Niffenegger is magnificent at writing description ... the problem is, she doesn't do much more than set a colorful stage where nothing happens. The poignant tale of Henry and Clare's love through time would have been better suited to a short story. I kept waiting for a major plotline to develop. Forget it. There is no actual point to the story, much less subplot. And once Henry's undeniable fate is revealed, all the reader can do is wait. And wait. And wait! By the end of the book I was annoyed, not heartbroken. I felt manipulated, not moved. I also found Ms. Niffenegger's first person present narrative to be tedious and sometimes jarring. Starting each section by actually defining the prose voice with "Henry:" or "Clare:" was a simplistic contrivance, and not worthy of Ms. Niffenegger's talent. (Again, I wish she had a better editor to steer her away from such lazy devices.) I can see how this book is tailor-made for movie rights. Unlike most novels which are too detailed to translate well to the screen, The Time Traveler's Wife has the bare bones of a wonderful film love story. I never thought I would say this, but I hope the screenwriter modifies the story to add more genuine conflict, a decent subplot and a few surprises. The characters, as written, are begging for more action.
spare yourself June 17, 2005
52 out of 78 found this review helpful
This book left me feeling dirty. I felt like a witness to a sick romance between a 40-something year old naked man and a child. The characters never felt real to me-even if I could have gotten past the time-travelling (which I couldn't)--but even if I could have...I was still left with this romance that seemed totally unrealistic. and I can not even begin to describe my disgust for Gomez -- actually, I didn't like any of the characters. Nymphomaniacs, Liars, Cheating, Alcoholics...even Kimy got on my nerves--do old Korean women use the word "buddy"? The final straw was after Clare delivered the baby she'd almost died for--she used the "C"-word to describe post-partum pains. First of all--no one uses that word. Its disgusting. and I have never heard it used by a new mother--what was the point? to be raw. edgy. fresh?
It felt odd and forced on me. I know I'm on my own out here since everyone else seems to have loved the book. oh well.
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