Rating: 
Summary: Clever and Compelling
Review: I admit: I am an easy touch when it comes to time-travel books. I have loved such diverse books with this theme as "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "A Wrinkle in Time," and "Time and Again."I was not disappointed by "The Time Traveler's Wife." The book both moved me and challenged me to think about a number of deeper issues in life (most notably, the true meaning of love in a romantic relationship). The underlying story concerns Henry, a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and Clare, his artist wife. Henry suffers from CDP (Chrono-Displacement Order) which whisks him from the present to another point of time (usually the past). One minute he may be in the stacks of the Newberry Library in 2003, the next minute he may find himself in a field (probably naked) in Michigan with his future wife as a child sometime in the early 1980's. The author does an excellent job of sequencing the book. Even though Henry is shuttling back and forth in every chapter, she manages to move the plot forward. You do feel that you see Henry and Clare meeting, falling in love, starting a marriage and going through the stages of their lives. You do get to know their family and friends and see life happen to them. However, I do feel that the author could have better developed all of her characters, particularly the supporting ones. I wanted to learn more about their close friends, Gomez and Charisse, and their troubled marriage. I felt that the landlady from Henry's child-whom he constantly visited in his time-traveling modes-was a sketch figure that could have been better developed. I wished that the author could have mined deeper into the inner feelings of Henry and Clare. Still I would highly recommend this book to most readers. (If time-travel books bother you, this won't change your opinion.) It is a good, hard-to-put down read. And at the end, you're exhausted by all the travel!
Rating: 
Summary: Divine Romp
Review: In terms of divine romps in fiction, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE ranks among the best. There is a quaintness that sooths the soul in the same nature as SECRET LIFE OF BEES. At the same time there is an urgency that excites and keeps you wrapped up as if the fiction world were true in the same nature as MY FRACTURED LIFE. The address of relationship shares precision with THE WEDDING and a dedication for love of the same nature as COLD MOUNTAIN. I am delighted with this book and recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: didn't do it for me
Review: Let me bigin this review by saying that I only managed to read the first 80 pages in. I lost interest long before there, but I pressed on. If a writer can't captivate my interest in the 1st 80 pgs, then it's not really worth exploring further. Overall, I liked the idea of having the book be told by the two characters. However, I felt that the constant jumping around so quickly in the beginning only left me wondering who these people really were. I only caught glimpses of them- they were 2 dimensional and not real. I think that she should have let the readers get used to the characters- tell a backbone story in the present before jumping around. Then we would have something to work with, and I think would then rid a lot of what has been said reagarding all the "confusing" jumping around. Personally, I was lost- first I was getting to know Henry at 35, then 24, then 15- ditto for Clare. How are we supposed to know who these people really are when we're not really dealing with only 2 characters? we're dealing with many versions of these characters all at once and what are we left with but a bunch of jumbled facts? Also, I thought the intro Walcott poem was pretentious, as was the Rilke poems. She could have just used a quote or just had the characters mention it. It is very pretentious for novelists to use a poem in their book, esp from a great poet like Rilke, that really isn't needed at all because a quote or reference or 2 would have done the trick. Overall, this is a mediocre and banal novel but I give it 2 stars for its attempt to be different. I think it failed, but at least it tried. So many of the novels don't even try, so that grants it at least one more star. Even though I only made it to pg 80, this is not a book that will stay with you- nothing in those 80 pgs really fascinated my attention, the way Falukner or Fitzgerald do. We're dealing with a whole lesser form of art when we're talking about this book.
Rating:
Summary: Time Travel
Review: The novel is set in Chicago within the peacefulness of Chicago suburbs and the lovely Newberry Library. The two main characters are wonderfully written and it's easy to care for them. This story has a wonderful pace and reads from both his and her point of view. You really feel the love between the main characters which transcends normal relationships because of his unusual trait and the nature of their relationship from the start. The book has tragic moments but it brings together the characters and serves the story well. I would love to see this developed for the movies. Read this if you enjoy romance, families and a bit of fantasy in the form of time travel!
Rating:
Summary: thought provoking...
Review: really interesting novel...fabulous premise, although i found it often difficult to keep track of the jumps forward and backward through time. and then i started over-thinking the premise, looking for hidden characters tucked away behind this wall or that lamp post... and wound up with a headache trying to visualize the potential time travel traffic jams that might occur as father & daughter (& maybe all those lost 'unborn' children) "bounced" around the universe. overall, however, there was a powerful love story that helped transcend all this chaotic clockwork...sort of. i had the distinct feeling that someone told the author her book was too long (or else she started to get the same brain-pain i was having) because the ending was a bit abrupt, hence, less-than-satisfying for this reader. i was also disappointed by the lack of character development/storyline for the secondary characters. but maybe that's just me...i'm not crazy about loose ends, especially after dedicating my time to reading/re-reading (to keep things straight) over 500 pages. i was very invested in this book, but my return, while good, was not quite what i'd anticipated.
Rating:
Summary: WOW!!!
Review: I have always been a time travel novel buff, but this book surpasses just about any that I have read (although the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon are excellent as well). At first some of the time travel confused me a bit, as we are flipping back and forth through time so often. However, everything starts piecing together and I found myself constantly saying "oh, okay now it makes sense!" as I read. Not only is the time travel portion of the book intriguing and honestly makes more sense than most other "time travel" books I've read, but the characters, especially of Clare and Henry, are so slowly revealed that by the time the book ends, you feel as if you knew them. Their love story is heartbreaking and yet hopeful. This book will make you laugh and cry and has all the makings for a contemporary classic.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written!
Review: I stumbled across this book by mistake and hesitated to read it simply because it was 518 pages. To my surprise, I devoured this book in a few days and felt a pang of sadness when it was finished. The author crafts a story of something that is quite unbelievable and yet deftly makes it so very believable. I was hooked after the first chapter. Niffenegger managed to suck me in to this story so that I felt emotionally bound to the characters and their plight. It's a tragic story that weaves so much love/pain/joy/disappointment that it fairly bursts with emotion. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, well-written, original
Review: "The Time Traveler's Wife" is one of the most interesting, powerful books I've read in a long time. Audrey Niffenegger did a beautiful job taking some of the most complex ideas - time travel, marriage, love, children, friends, literary and artistic allusions, religion, death, drugs, childhood, growing, loss, and what it means to be human - and weaving them together poetically and with amazing clarity. Her characters are wonderful, "real" people with strengths and flaws, and I really grew to adore them. Despite skipping around time at the same rate as Henry, the time traveler, the events are sequenced in such a way that you still witness each character's growth as a person, as well as discover many surprises along the way. Clare and Henry's story is one of the best love stories I've read in a very long time. This book also echoes important modern-day questions about the appropriateness of gene therapy, and what it means to be a human being. I highly and enthusiastically recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of my top ten favorites
Review: This book is great. I read it in 3 days, which with 2 small children, a job and household duties, isn't easy!! I also don't love that many books, even ones everyone seems to love. It is one of the greatest love stories ever written, but not in a mushy overly sentimental way. I also never bother to rate books on line but I just had to add my two cents. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: The element of human relationships in a great book
Review: Having come across this book purely by accident, I wasn't affected in any way by hype or pre-conceived notions. What I found was a well-written book that surprised me. Ultimately, this book is about relationships and emotions, laid on over a skeleton of novel plot devices and engaging, fairly realistic young urban characters who read books and make art and have opinions on politics and literature and cook interesting food and deal with their parents and with each other. The way the protagonists interact with their parents is a whole worthwhile subplot in itself. And all this activity takes place over some of the most interesting years of the 20th century. Then the author postulates what the imeediate future (next twenty years or so) will be like in the society these people inhabit. This book is a fascinating idea developed well by a good thinker. It is similar to Jackson McCrae's "The Bark of the Dogwood" in the level of reading difficulty and in the level of engagement it asks of the reader, as well as in the glimpse it affords into the lives of people who are slightly different from those around them. What it is not is a Grisham novel with the requisite twenty pages of gratuitous sex. All told there is about one paragraph's worth of mildly, tastefully described sex in this hundreds-of-pages-long novel, and none of that is gratuitous. I would highly recommend this book along with another great read: "Bark of the Dogwood" by Jackson Tippett McCrae.
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