Rating: Summary: Heartfelt and True (and delightfully offbeat) Review: A high-wire act of bravura writing, Audrey Niffenegger takes a tired literary device, the time travel yarn, and reinvents it to produce a moving portrait of a most peculiar marriage. For all the impressive convolutions of its Moebius-strip plot, in the end the book's greatest strength is its characters. Updike once said that Anne Tyler loves her characters more than God, and the same might be said of Ms. Niffenegger, a fresh voice who share's Tyler's sense of the absurd, but brings to the mix an edge and daring uniquely her own. Can't wait to see where she travels next!
Rating: Summary: A joy! Review: This might be one of the most wonderful books I've ever read, and I'd like to thank Audrey Niffenegger for having written it!
Rating: Summary: One of the best books I've read Review: this is one of the most original yet intriguing and spell-binding books I've ever read. I actually read it twice which I never do and was as intrigued the second time as the first - looking for clues and finding a few jewels. Her writing is disarmingly simple - you are immediately in the depth of their lives. I would recommend it for those who like the science fiction angle but for anyone who thoroughly enjoys fantastic prose.
Rating: Summary: Clear your schedule before starting this book Review: I stayed up all night reading this book. Then I gave it to my roomate, who did the same thing. I have to say, usually I hate every book through page thirty, but with this one I was hooked by page seven. The only other book I felt that way about is A Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is completely different from The Time Traveler's Wife but equally engrossing and well-written. If you plan on reading it, I'd suggest clearing your schedule for the next ten hours.
Rating: Summary: COMPELLING Review: great reading material found within this one. very engrossing. well worth the hardback price! quite good! ( I am not a writer so my review wont do it justice. buy it. youll like it)
Rating: Summary: Best book of the year Review: Well now. This certainly was a powerful book that I wasn't expecting. Henry, the punk time-travelling librarian, is a character you will not soon forget. He's with me right here, right now as I'm typing. Clare, the loving wife, is another character who's outcome will leave you frightened. The very last chapter is the one that makes you pause and become very still. For me, Clare's last chapter was the crux and ultimate moral of the story. Would you rather know what your future holds and wait forever for it, or would you rather not know, and discover it only as it comes? I've been thinking long and hard about that question. I've done a total re-evaluation of previous answers and am somewhat in flux about it. Get your tissues out for the last half of the book. Trust me on this. I had to drink quite a few glasses of wine to make it through the last quarter. There are moments where you really don't want to be sober. Trust me. This is an amazing book. This is a *really* specatacular book. I'm not giving praise lightly. I work in a library. I read a *lot* of books. This one's making the rounds with staff, and we're all sort of walking around with a dazed expression on our faces. This is a powerful book that will suck about two days of your life away. But they're two days that you will gladly sacrifice.
Rating: Summary: A genre-blurring, time-hopping treasure Review: Some of the most interesting works of art occur when genres collide. Think of Star Wars, that successfully melded the Western with the Buddy Movie and Sci-Fi. Audrey Niffenegger's first novel is such a collision, between science fiction and romance, and the result is both creepy (the sci-fi part) and poignant (the love story). If this were just your average chick-lit romance, it would be kinda treacly. A girl who meets her future husband when she's six, and who, at the end of the book, at 82, is still rapturously in love with him? But when this husband is a genetic mutant who blips from one moment in time to another uncontrollably (and sometimes with hideous consequences), the entire story shifts into a realm of its own, a realm that is only bordered by Niffenegger's lyrically twisted imagination. Somehow, Niffenegger manages to keep the reader engaged in the lives of these two people, to provide enough pseudo-science to keep her wild plot feasible (Henry's doctor starts publishing articles about him, and even breeds time-travelling mice so he can study the problem). But the strangeness of events never overwhelms the love story, and by the end of the book, the reader will be moved by what finally happens to Henry and Clare. Besides, aren't we all time travelers of a sort when it comes to relationships? All it takes is a song on the radio, or passing a favorite restaurant, and suddenly, in our minds, we're transported backwards to another moment we shared with someone. Niffenegger makes that process real, and the result is one of the most unusual novels you'll read this year, (or next).
Rating: Summary: Spellbounding! Review: I can't say enough good things about this book. I knew the minute I read what the book was about, it was going to be something I had to have. I was right! I was attached to this book in ways that I can't describe, except I do know that the last 40 pages or so, had me crying so hard, I couldn't see the words. All through the book, I laughed, I teared up and I said "wow" out loud, never knowing how it would end or what to expect from the story. Well, it bowled me over. At times I was a little confused and I would go back, check dates and reread passages, but it didn't matter. I was so involved with the story and characters, that I thought about them when I was away from the book. I am writing this right after I have finished reading it, so I am still a little overwhelmed, but if you are reading this review, and you like love stories, books about time travel or just an original story that is like no other, read this book. Ms. Niffenegger, thank you! What a roller coaster of a read, what a wonderful, beautiful love story.
Rating: Summary: Skeptical Situations Cloud a Breezy Romantic Epic Review: The Time Traveler's Wife is well written, easy to read, and has a lyrical sensibility. That being said, I thought the book's premises, that it can be both a love story and pseudo-science fiction novel, difficult to believe on either merit and clouded by seemingly naïve dialogue between characters that, at times, seemed out of character. From the start, readers familiar with science fiction and the current philosophies of time travel are forced to believe that a "time traveler" can be in two different times at once (a nice writing device but flawed), and that although the character cannot control his time destination he manages to arrive at some of the same location at opportune moments to the story for unexplained reasons. Even stranger, on a romantic level, I found it difficult to understand how a pre-pubescent girl can have seemingly mature psycho-sexual thoughts for someone she meets infrequently and under the most ridiculous circumstances. Many of the scenes are written with one character as an adult and the other character half or almost a third of the other's age. I found some of the scenes between the pre-pubescent girl and the older male time traveler downright creepy. The quick-edit, jumpiness between times (a product of the novel's diary-style format) can be distracting and awkward to further the reader's understanding of character development, and disruptive to the narrative. There isn't so much narrative as there are endless paragraphs of longing between the two main characters have for each other-a lot of which happens when they are not together. This novel has a good premise but lacks the detail and flow good sci-fi stories have. As a love story, I thought some of the diary entries were sappy, esoteric and felt like endless diatribes about relationships and unrequited love.
Rating: Summary: Thumping good read Review: Thoroughly enjoyable story, which also has depth of meaning if you want to approach it from a literary standpoint. Either way, it is an excellent book. This is not your parents' "Portrait of Jenny", which dealt with a similar subject but in a much more sentimental way. There is sentiment, and depth of emotion, here but both are strongly rooted in the characters as it is definitely a character driven book (notwithstanding the central plot conceit of time travel). Don't let the concept of time travel put you off this book. It really is not a sci-fi/fantasy story.
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