The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger| Review

Hey guys,

So if you have seen my recent book haul you may have seen that I found this in my favourite shop, the £1 book shop. This is another one of those books where I have inexplicably learnt the plot of the book without having read the blurb or seen the film. I'm not really sure how that happens but I guess this one is fairly self-explanatory. If you do want a more in depth synopsis here is the blurb from GoodReads:

Audrey Niffenegger's dazzling debut is the story of Clare, a beautiful, strong-minded art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: his genetic clock randomly resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous and unpredictable, and lend a spectacular urgency to Clare and Henry's unconventional love story. That their attempt to live normal lives together is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control makes their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.



I was fairly curious about this book simply because of the time travel aspect. As you may or may not have gathered by now I love fantasy, high fantasy, urban fantasy I don't care I just love it. But despite the time travel aspect this book is very much a contemporary, and an adult contemporary at that. So I wanted to see how that would play out, and honestly I thought this book was a little over-rated. I suspect this is partially because it is a contemporary, but I even for a contemporary I thought this book was boring. Yup that's right I said boring. If you'd have asked me before I read this I would never have suspected that time travel could be boring.

The problem is the way the time travel works in this book, is a deterministic everything happens in a certain way and you can't change the past even if you wanted to. This kind of removes any interesting drama that could arise from time travel, and leaves you with a contemporary with no mystery whatsoever- you already know they are going to end up together from the title and first page of the book. So that just leaves you with there rather mundane lives, now how anyone that can time travel can have a mundane life is beyond me, but this book manages it pretty well. I would have even preferred it if there had been a little drama with when he time travels further in the past before Claire- but whilst it's repeated from time to time that he gets beaten up and has to steal, we never actually see how that unfolds. This book was far far to long for something so boring.

There are a couple other things I didn't like, I wasn't a fan of how old Henry behaves around little Claire I know they end up together but that's still kind of creepy. I also don't like how Claire basically has no choice but to end up with Henry. 

I do think that a genetic time travel illness is a cool idea, but the way it was executed really wasn't for me. I think people who are bigger fans of the adult contemporary genre will get along better with it. 

3/5 (and tbh I'm being generous here) 

 ~Louisa