Time Travel with an extraodinary love story (The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger)

Member Name: mickeyhunt

Product:	The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Date:	14/08/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A uniquie and entertaining read

Disadvantages: You do need to concentrate to pick everyhing up and deal with the wrtining style

I read this book fairly recently after purching it about 18 months ago. I put off reading it for so long, because I kept starting it and found the style that it was written in off putting. It was written in first person present tense which I found difficult to contend with. Eventually I persevered and I am so glad that I did.

The book was a realy good entertaining read. A cross between a love story with science fiction/fantasy. It was an amazing idea, so different from what I had been reading. I don't know how authors manage to come up with such off the wall ideas and then put them together in such a fashion that it works.

The plot revolves around Henry who can time travel in his own timeline, explained away by a genetic problem. He cannot control when and where he goes, but linked into his timeline is Clare who he meets at different times of his life and hers. They also meetup later in normal time as well as during his time jumps. At first this idea is strange and confusing, but soon becomes clearer.

I soon became fully imersed in the life of the two main characters Clare and Henry and fully accepted that he was able to jump around in his own time line. It soon becomes clear that the ablility to time travel may not be the blessing that people would imagine, although it could make intersting living. You soon get used to the way the story is told, because it is such an absorbing and strange story, although it jumps around which I found frustrating when I wanted to know the outcome of an event and had to wait quite a few pages for explanation. I am really looking forward to seeing this as a film, although Eric Bana is not the person I envisaged for Henry. My perfect actor for this part would have been Paul Bettany.

When deciding to buy this book and reading the blurb on the back. it did put me off a little at first when I read that Henry first met Clare when she was 6 and he was 30 and he fell in love, which made me a bit uncomfortable. Reading on to find that they married when she was 20 and he was 28 then really intrigued me. You do not really get a sense of how orginal and unusual the story is. I was only after I had read the whole book (and I warn you that you will need copious amounts of tissues) that I realised how wonderful a story it was. While reading, I was intent on finding out more and more about the characters and how their story evolved. Once you get into it, it does move at a very fast pace and sometimes you can miss out on something that you have read and then find that later on something does not make sense, so I had to go back a few times and read more carefully to try and work out what was happening.

This was one of those books that I really did not want to finish. I wanted the story to go on and on and I felt that the characters were people I really knew and when the book finished it was like losing some good friends.

If you liked the Life of Pi, or Lovely Bones or the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night then this is a book you will enjoy.

Summary: A love story with a difference.