BAM Jan 08: Time Traveler's Wife

I have been wanting to read this book forever, and now I can return it to the person I borrowed it from (in 2004!).

Time travel is an interesting concept, one that always grabs my attention as it requires a keen eye on physics, space and time, and cool things like wormholes, quantum mechanics. Just sounds complicated. Henry has the ability to travel in time, and meets his wife when she is quite young. I found myself to be incredibly jealous of Henry and his ability to time travel, especially to see his parents before he was born. Such a great treasure to see parents before they became parents. I was terribly weepy at the end of the book as Henry was dying and in the letter he wrote to Clare. Though, I found the whole Clare and Henry dynamic a bit tiring, and would have liked some conflict between them. Their love story just seemed to good to be true, too amazing and wonderful.

And I suppose that is the point as well, Henry does time travel and one can't really do that. I appreciated the way Niffenegger let us know who was narrating, and the way she would paint a scene over many years and through the experiences of many people. I wouldn't say that I loved the book, but I am glad that I read it. From a science standout, I appreciated that Henry wasn't allowed to impact the future and change the outcome of things. How sad to carry that burden with him, but allowed the story to have a cohesive narrative as well as be a bit more believable. Though in the beginning I found the narrative a bit hard to follow. I was confused for about the first 50 pages, but was drawn to the characters. Perhaps an index to all the dates would have been helpful.

Overall, I enjoyed the escapism into a fantastic love story, sad and beautiful.