Rating: 
Summary: Could have been better
Review: I read a few books a week and so when I heard about this book, I immediately purchased it based on the reviews. I really wanted to like this book but after finishing it, I'm just not that impressed by it. For one thing, it is way too long. There is a lot of stuff that could have been edited out. I also wish it could have just been written in chronological order. I got very confused by all the dates and ages (1991 Clare is 8, Henry is 41; 1987 Clare is 31, Henry is 15) - it was really hard to keep it straight. Also, the book seemed to fall apart after they got married. There was less detail about their life together. It was like "oh they're married now so they don't spend any time together anymore". I was also disappointed that the author used such crude terms for the male and female anatomy. It was almost like it was for shock value and it didn't jibe with the rest of the book. For the most part, I enjoyed the book and it was a very unique concept but I guess it just wasn't for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful.....
Review: I have just finished The Time Traveler's Wife and I must say it made me incredibly happy - I loved it. It has inspired me to write my first book review ever! The love story between Henry and Clare is beautiful, and although Henry's time traveling presents many obstacles and complications, their love is refreshingly uncomplicated. Their story is of a strong, tender, and pure love - not the overly dramatic or bodice ripping type of love so often portrayed in literature and film. There is a phenomenon that love brings in which you feel as if you have loved someone your whole life, loved the little child that existed long before life ever brought the two of you together. This book beautifully brings that concept to life, as Henry is able to time travel and know his wife as she grows from a six year old into the young woman he is destined to marry. As several of the other reviews mentioned, I would recommend reading this book all at once, I assure you this will not be hard to do!
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to put down, and dangerous if you do
Review: Great book!!! Rather than go into a review of the book, let me offer up a few suggestions if you decide to pick up this gem. 1) Give it some time to get into it. It took me about 50-75 pages to really get my mind around the time travel aspect of the story. Once you figure it out, you'll be hooked. 2) Related to #1, I would not try and start reading this book unless you can take the time to get into it and not read it in small doses. This may have been my problem at first, I started reading the book 10-20 pages at a time and that probably caused me to take a bit longer to "get" it. 3) Plan on having a hard time putting it down in the end. When it is over, you may want to reread it and reread it again.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting and Intriguing
Review: I found this book to be utterly fascinating although I would warn potential readers that it is easy to lose track of the story if it is set aside for a day or two! This book certainly makes one stop and think- what WOULD it be like to be chrono-displaced? It is a good love story as well. I would consider this to be one of the top 10 books I read this year.
Rating:
Summary: INTERESTING BUT BADLY FLAWED
Review: A gangbuster beginning deteriorated into redundancy. The premise was intriguing and I must admit I liked the relationship between Clare and Henry. As a love story in the "Time and Again" mode it was quite engaging. However, like a number of other reviewers, I feel that most secondary characters were underdeveloped--shadow people who deserved a better fate. I was also uncomfortable with Henry's disinclination to change the past or future. He could have tried! Are we victims of fate? Have we no free will? Finally I was very, very dissatisfied with the ending. Did Clare actually wait patiently for Henry's brief return when she was 82? That's a bit long-suffering for my taste. What happened to Alba? Did she suffer the same type of fate or did Dr. Kendrick discover the cure? After 500+ pages I thought I deserved more!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I'm so glad that I didn't pay any attention to the negative reviews for this book. I think it was absolutely unique and amazing.
Rating:
Summary: Unique love story
Review: I'm not a big fan of love stories. If they go on long enough, they almost always end sadly, in death or parting, and there's quite enough of that in real life. But I saw "The Time Traveler's Wife" in an airport bookstore, was intrigued enough to start reading, and was hooked. No, it didn't change my opinion of love stories, but I'm glad that I read it, and would recommend it to others. The basic concept is that Henry, the time traveler of the title, has a genetic disease something like epilepsy that causes him, usually at moments of stress, to come unstuck in time, and to vanish, reappearing semi-randomly, usually at some other time and place related to his personal history. He arrives quite naked, which introduces problems that often help to move the narrative forward. In time-travel stories, a critical issue is whether there are single or multiple timelines: can traveler can go back in time and change an event that he has witnessed, spawning an new timeline, or is he constrained to repeat the event exactly? "The Time Traveler's Wife" chooses the single timeline approach, so Henry (and the book) grapples with a sense of predestination that is very literal. (For another, very different, time-travel novel of character that chooses the multiple timeline approach, see David Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself".) The author plays fair with this constraint. Even if Henry encounters a younger self, he cannnot alter an event that he remembers. However, consistent time loops are allowed, so Henry can sometimes bring back information from the future. The other main character is Clare, the time traveler's wife of the title. Events are described from the viewpoint of both Henry and Clare (when both are present). This device generally works quite well, and helps to keep Henry's fragmented personal history from becoming too confusing. The book mostly follows Clare's timeline, beginning with their first meeting when Clare is 6 years old, young enough to take the sudden appearance out of nowhere of a naket 36-year old man in stride. Yet from Henry's perspective, he first meets Clare when he is 28 and encounters a 20-year old woman who insists that she has known him all her life. I found the early encounters between the older Henry and the young Clare to be particularly engaging. Fantasy is at its best when it takes the commonplace and turns it slightly askew to make it fresh and interesting, and "The Time Traveler's Wife" is a fine example of this. The time-travel device, while providing the narrative hook of the work, ultimately is used to explore the familiar themes of love and loss, separation and reunion, from a unique perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: She teaches writing?
Review: I gave this two stars because I find the concept behind the novel fresh and innovative. Sadly, I have very little other praise for the book. First of all, I was simultaniously astonished, horrified, and encouraged that this woman teaches writing. I expected this to be the beginning work of a young author who makes the expected mistakes of one wading into the river of fiction writing, so to speak. The style is juvenile and the character development limited to physical descriptions and two dimensional characteristics (they are self-proclaimed "punks", for example). The encouragement I felt was that, as a sixteen year old, my level of writing surpasses hers. She carries off the stream of thought of an eleven year old well, but misses all the subtleties of the dialogue between adult characters. The author chooses instead to write poorly constructed action punctuated with words she believes represent twenty-somethings, their conversations interspersed with words like "c**k" that jar and rag the ebb of her words. Additionally, one of her two main characters, Clare, is a blatant "Mary Sue" character. To provide a definition for readers unfamiliar with the term, "Mary Sue" is beautiful, rich, and intelligent. Boys fall in love with her instantly, and she can do no wrong. She saves the day in the end, finds true love, and has sufficient angst for good measure (her cigarette burns and the bruises she earns for preserving her chastity are justified by Big Mean Stunningly Attractive Man, who appears only to avenge his lover and then, typically, vanishes). This has unpleasant undertones of deus ex machina, and the utilization of a plot device that should have died with Greek Classicism becomes increasingly annoying as the novel progresses. Finally, I was unhappy with the presentation of the narrative, which seems trite, contrived, and choppy. The point of view fluctuates numerous times per chapter, always in first person, and while it is not difficult to determine who is speaking, it comes off as useless and annoying. I understand the praise from other readers who appreciated the efforts of a budding novelist. However, I would like to encourage those who enjoyed the style to read works from Kurt Vonnegut, who uses allegories and symbolism that challenge the mind much more than a flirty book like this one.
Rating:
Summary: great idea, just not a good book
Review: well, here is another book for the "great idea, just not a great book" file! ms. niffenegger had an original idea, however, she became too wrapped up in writing about punk rock, sex and anarchy. if i had to read another preachy passage about any of the above mentioned topics, i was close to wishing i could travel to the future (just to be done with the book). i didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. i understand ms. niffenegger is an artist... she should stick with art.
Rating: 
Summary: When Good Ideas Go Bad
Review: Before I begin the review, let me start with a disclaimer. I am notoriously picky about what I read, watch, and listen to. My taste rarely gels with the mainstream. So while I absolutely didn't like this book (as much as I WANTED to like it), I'm sure most of you will love it. In other words, don't listen to me. Anyway, the idea of this book is what drew me to it. I don't usually read romances or time travel books, but from everything I read, it sounded like an interesting blend of romance and sci-fi. The idea is still good; the problem was in the execution. First off, as other reviewers (even those who like the book) have noted, there's not a lot of depth to pretty much everyone other than Henry and Clare. The idea that Clare's friend Gomez is madly in love with her comes out of left-field 3/4 of the way into the book and is never developed much further. Nell, the black cook, and Kimy the Korean landlord come off to me as little more than ethnic stereotypes. Then there's just a myriad of friends and acquaintances who pop into the narrative from time-to-time but are not given any flesh on their bones. The lack of depth infects the entire novel. While it is a sprawling 500+ pages, most scenes are tiny snapshots that reveal little. For example, there's a little two-page snippet on September 11, 2001 that doesn't provide anything about what the characters think or feel about the event, but more or less just states its existence (as if we didn't know). The same can be said for most scenes in the book. The farther I read, the more I kept thinking that if I had been the editor who saw this monstrosity come across my desk, I would have sent it back and told the author to focus the story on a handful of crucial events instead of applying a wild, scattershot approach. In the end, I didn't feel that a lot of the issues about Henry's time traveling and Henry and Clare's relationship were dealt with. For example, with all his money and resources, why did he even bother trying to live a "normal" life? Why not just kick back in his mansion with his wife and read books or discuss philosophy or whatever all day? I didn't see a suitable answer in the story, but that's just me (see disclaimer above). As for the two main characters, by the end I didn't really like either one of them. Clare always seemed to me to be a whiny, spoiled rich girl who never worked a day in her life, whose sole purpose was to pine after Henry and nurse him on occasion. As for Henry, I was largely ambivalent towards him--I understood that he had a lot of problems--until the scene where 41-year-old Henry has sex with 18-year-old Clare in The Meadow. OK, it was consensual, but she's naïve, vulnerable, and HALF HIS AGE! He's old enough at that point to be her father! Doesn't he have any self-control? If that's the author's idea of wonderful, timeless love, it did not sit well with me at all. After that scene, I was just counting the pages until Henry's inevitable demise. This leads me to another problem I had, which was unnecessarily lewd language and descriptions used throughout the book. In the aforementioned scene in The Meadow, the author refers to Henry putting his tongue in Clare's [rhymes with 'slit'] and talks about her love of oral sex. Later Clare talks about how her [rhymes with 'hunt'] hurts. It's not that I have a problem with some frank talk about sex, but such language spoiled the illusion of the purity of their love and made it, well, you know, dirty. I guess you can label me a prude for that if you want. OK, one last issue before I pack it in for this review. Do you think it was right for Henry to insert himself into Clare's past (albeit unconsciously) and unwittingly make her fall in love with him? Do you think that she would have fallen in love with him if they had never met in The Meadow when she was six? I can't really answer the latter question, but I doubt it. Their whole relationship seemed built on the bond she built with him in the past (or his future if you want to get technical), not the present. As for the former question, ethically I don't think it was right for him to involve himself with her in the past. In Star Trek they have the Temporal Prime Directive that basically says that should you happen to go back in time for whatever reason, stay low and butt out of people's lives. I think Henry should have followed that doctrine. You can make the case that he had no choice, but didn't he? He didn't have to reveal himself to her or tell her when he was coming back. The author's assertion that because it had already happened it was going to happen no matter what did not wash with me. Again, doesn't he have any self-control? In conclusion, there are two types of readers in my opinion. There's most of the public who just want an entertaining yarn and can get by with superficial stories and bland prose (I'll save you from a rant on the author's lackluster writing style). Then there's the minority of people like me who look for depth and quality in a book. So, most of you are safe; you can buy this book and come away satisfied. It's the people in the latter category who are going to be disappointed with this long-winded, shallow disaster.
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