Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Series: Stand-alone

Genre: Soft Science Fiction Romance

Pages: 560 Pages (Hard cover)

Original Publication Date: January 1, 2003

Overall Rating:
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Summary from Goodreads

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 entirely 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.

My Thoughts

I’m torn with The Time Traveler’s Wife.  I enjoyed the story for the most part, but there are three things that make it impossible for me to love it.  (The third reason contains spoilers.)

First, I’m not a big fan of profanity, especially when the profanity is the F-word.  I’ll read books with language in it and try to skip over the words as best I can, but the language usually keeps me from enjoying the book as much as I could’ve if it weren’t there in the first place.

Second, I’m not a fan of graphic sex.  I don’t need to know everything that’s done during the sex act.  I don’t mind knowing that the characters are sexually active; I just don’t want to know what he did to pleasure her or she did to pleasure him.  At that point, I feel like the book becomes more of a sex story than a love story. It feels as though the characters lust after each other rather than really love each other.  In Henry and Clare’s case, I do feel like they truly loved each other, but there’s more to a relationship than sex and I wanted to see those aspects explored more.

Third, and most importantly, I hated the ending.  It bugged me that Henry told Clare not to wait for him after he died, but then told her that he sees her when she’s 82.  Of course she’s going to wait for him armed with that knowledge!  She’d been waiting for him her entire life.  He just needed to let it happen like so many other things did during his and Clare’s life.

These things keep me from knowing that I’ll read the story again.  At this point, I may or may not; I’m just not sure.  However, I did like the story most of the time so I do recommend it to others as you may not have the same objections as I do.  And, because I did enjoy the story most of the time, I’d still like to see the movie as long as it doesn’t contain nudity or language.