Book Review

I just finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger this morning and I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts together to be able to piece them together into anything resembling a coherent manner. There’s just so much I want to say about this book, that I don’t know where to begin. So I guess I’ll just start off by educating those who aren’t familiar with this book by quoting the blurb on the back:

"When Henry meets Clare, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before; Clare has known Henry since she was six. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. Henry and Clare’s attempts to live normal lives are threatened by a force they can neither prevent nor control, making their passionate love story intensely moving and unforgettable. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a story of fate, hope and belief, and more than that, it’s about the power of love to endure beyond the bounds of time."

That gets a little cheesy at the end, I know, but the book is truly magnificent. I don’t read a lot of recent fiction; most of it is way too post-modern (or, as I like to put it, full of “weird crap that depresses me”). This is different somehow. I’ll try not to give too much away, but the ending, although rather sad, is also satisfying. I found myself emotionally engaged with the main characters, something I rarely find in modern novels.

Normally, I’m very sceptical of romantic stories. Not this time. Something in the writing, or the people involved, or the story itself just caught me up and weaved a web around me that I couldn’t escape from and ended up pulling me in to this book like no other. This is truly an unforgettable love story.