The Time Traveler's WifeAudrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler's Wife tells the love story of Clare and Henry, whose romance and eventual life together is marred by the fact that Henry time travels randomly. Like Sam Beckett, he travels only within his own lifetime, but he also stays fairly close to home during his temporal adventures. The romance between Clare and Henry is muddled by their braided timestreams, but manages to work itself out, anyway.
While this book dragged me in and held my attention thoroughly for the most part, in the end I had mixed feelings about it.
From a technical standpoint, the book is a tour de force, leaping from time frame to time frame, incident to incident, forward and backward in time in an alternating first person narrative between hero and heroine, without ever leaving the reader behind. But from a character and plot standpoint, I was left not entirely satisfied.
Clare is a seemingly strong, well-developed character through the first two-thirds or so of the novel, until the birth of Clare and Henry's daughter. From this point on, she seems almost like a accessory to the story, as Henry's condition worsens. After his eventual death, the rest of Clare's life is glossed over. There's no indication that she moved on or found another relationship after Henry--as far as we can tell, she simply pined away for the rest of her life, waiting for their final reunion when he time travels far into her future. I would have liked to have seen at least a brief recap and some closure for Clare, rather than have her become just an appendage for the wrap-up of Henry's story.
Henry's story, too, didn't quite work for me. Many hints were dropped that his death would come about due to a complication of his temporal displacement condition, but with one large foreshadowing event indicating it would be otherwise, this was never to develop. Having him die at the mercy of his "illness" would have been much more satisfying to me. As it was, his death was, in my opinion, too mundane.
I didn't dislike the book by any means, and would recommend it, as it's a good read that lingers long after you've reached the end. But it seemed to me to miss the mark--though just barely--that would have made it a classic.
