The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

[lightreads]

Henry has a genetic disorder that makes him involuntarily travel back and forth in time, visiting and revisiting moments of emotional significance. He meets Claire when she is six and he is thirty-six. They're married when she catches up to him in realtime in her early twenties.

If you'd asked me about this book midway through, I would have snapped something irritable about those creepy goddamn books where a much older man is the close childhood friend of a girl he later marries. At the end of the book I'll concede that yes, Henry does visit Claire from the time she's six until he deflowers her at eighteen, but that the tables are turned when they connect in linear time and Claire has all these memories of a man that the pre-Claire alcoholic Henry doesn't have. This makes the whole thing less gender creepy, but still creepy. There's nothing more romantic than effectively creating your remembered fabulous mate out of the person they aren't yet?

Actually, you know, it's a really well-written book on a couple of levels. The prose is firm but kind of dreamy, and there's some neat background work with Claire's family in particular. But I was never more than moderately interested, and creepiness aside I think that's because the book did nothing exciting or original for me with love, time travel, or destiny. And it really could have, because what a great idea.

Comments

[readerjane]

Interesting. Azriona (Did I spell it right? Not like the state? Yes, moving on...) is playing with a similar idea in her book-length Whofic, Water Music. It's about the evolving, criss-crossing relationship between the Doctor and River Song. I wish she'd finish writing it soon, 'cause I want to read the whole thing!

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, that I will read.

And also thank you, because duh, but I couldn't actually figure out that the feeling I was having -- 'I know people do time travel better than this' -- was for new Who.

[treewishes.livejournal.com]

Dunno -- it sounds awfully contrived. But if the author can pull it off, I'm all for contrivances.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Hard to say. I can't always predict what you'll like, unlike I can for a lot of other people.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I kind of hated this book, not because it was particularly bad, but because as a SF fan I thought the time-travel excitement was... well, kind of bleah. The non-SF fans I know absolutely loved it.

(I also hate hate hate that stupid older man/young girl friendship/romance dynamic. It's the one thing that really ticks me off about Diana Wynne Jones, and to a lesser extent Bujold.)

Ted Chiang does some awesome stuff with time nonlinearity, if you haven't read him. The classic (SF) is "Story of Your Life," (http://heptapod.org/storylife.html), and I also really like (fantasy) "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate."

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Ah-ha, you decided me on my next book. I've had Stories of Your Life and Others sitting here for over a year, so let's give it a whirl.

Content of Reviewerly thoughts halfway through = yay!