A review by lenorayoder
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

emotional
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Better than I thought it would be, but not as good as I hoped it would be once I got into it. It's very interesting to read a fucked up relationship develop from the perspective of the people in it. They do love each other, but they're also overly dependent, unhealthy, and don't communicate well. They are the only people who understand each other, but it is because they have both engineered it to be so. On some level they both know the relationship is doomed, but they don't want to be without each other.

I found the way the author handled time travel interesting, especially the implications of Clare's
deja vu moments, and the sketch with the trimmed date
. The underlying terror that Henry almost constantly feels permeates the book, and one of the unvoiced stumbling blocks of their relationship is that Clare never really seems to understand that fear -
evidenced by the fact that she so desires to have a child that will likely have the same terrible condition
. The way Niffenegger's chosen to depict this story and time travel unfortunately means that the reader never really gets to sit with these characters, and by the end of the book I still felt like I didn't really know them, just their relationship. I wish the book was more narrow in scope, or gave us more insight into what Clare and Henry are like apart. The Time Traveler's Wife is a compelling title, but the book is not about Clare, it's entirely about Clare and Henry's relationship with everything else serving as set dressing. 

Overall enjoyed and would recommend. Sometimes the descriptions and references get a little self-indulgent and pretentious, but seeing this complex relationship evolve from the perspective of two incredibly biased narrators was always interesting and page-turning. Also,
fuck you Gomez. Cherisse, why the fuck did you marry that man, let alone have kids with him. Yikes
. I had to list so many content warnings and I didn't even get them all. 

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