The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

Since I have been seeing the commercials for the upcoming movie version of this book I felt it was time to review it. I read it a few months ago and can honestly tell you it is now my favorite book. I may have to give it another quick read before the movie, but I remember it well enough to tell you about it now.

First let me say that from what the commercials show it seems like a 'girlie' book. If the commercials are portraying the movie correctly it has been turned into a chick flick but I really hope that is just an advertising trick to turn it into a date movie. Please, please, please let there be more to the movie than they are showing.

When I read the book I did not see it in any way as 'girlie.' It is told from both the wife's and husband's prosepectives, though through most of the book they are neither wife or husband. The story is really more about the life of Henry De Tamble (the Time Traveler) and I read it as a sort of autobiography/biography of his life. Of course there is a love element to the story. It is in no way a sappy love story, though, it is quite painful.

Without giving too much away I will tell you that Henry began spontaneously time traveling around age 6. He can't control it or predict it. He also travels without anything material, which means he shows up wherever he is going naked and penniless. One of these trips takes the adult Henry back to meet his future wife when she was a child (age 6 or 8, can't remember). Of course, he does not reveal their future relationship, but he ends up there with her often enough to really know her as a child and she grows up in love with him already.

Yes, it is very confusing. Your whole sense if time and space gets warped reading this and the weird part is how you get used to it the more you read. There are tense moments, funny moments, and tragic moments through out the book. The highest praise I can give Neffenegger is that no matter how sad, scary or confusing it gets, it is always amusing and never far fetched.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Please read it before you go to the movie. If I had to pick one book to read over and over for my entire life it would be this one. There is just so much depth to the characters that I think you could never get enough of them.