Liarbyrd's Book Review

I'm about fifty pages from the end of The Time Traveller's Wife. I'm having mixed feelings about the book. I'm not sure I like it.

Anyone who knows me knows that there are three things I love in a story: zombies, mummies, and time travel. Not all at the same time, but that'd be cool.

So the premise of the book: Henry DeTamble can spontaniously and uinconsciously travel in time. Sometimes forwards, usually backwards to places he's already been. He always shows up naked (because clothes can't trael thrugh time) and usually nauseous.

Henry has been appearing to Clare since she was six. Clare will grow up to marry the Present Henry when she is a twenty-something. And this is where I start to have misgivings.

Hnery loves Clare. That's apparent on the page. When he's away in another time, he just wants to get home to his wife. Sometimes he gets lucky and he finds his wife, but she's still a child. So he'll spend an innocent, pleasant afternoon helping her with her homework before being jerked back to his present.

Clare love Henry but sometimes only becauses she knows she must, because she knows they will be married at some point in the future. I don't feel as convinced by her half of the narritive.

And Clare is desperate to have a baby. She makes herself and Henry miserable in her almost crazed need to give birth. (They have difficulty because Henry's genes are barely human and Clare has miscarriages.) Maybe it's because I don't have a need to make little people, I don't feel "hollow inside" the way Clare does....but I really don't like her and her shrill baby longing, which is more than half of the book. But maybe it's because I'm prejudiced against women who got to see fertility doctors because I just do not understand that need to make babies. Maybe I'm too hard on Clare, I don't know.

But I'm getting near the end. This is pretty much Henry heavy, he's a narrator, which makes it a stronger piece of story. Henry dies somehow. (not sure how just yet.) He doesn't know yet but he jumped to the future and and everyone is so happy to see him, it actually made me cry. And that's another part of this book that bothers me. My emotions are all over the map here. I destest some characters but the story is so compelling I can not put it down and it's made me cry in a few passages. I've actually had to put the book down because I couldn't see through the tears.

So here I am at the end of the book, still not sure if I like it, still not able to put my finger on exactly what bugs me, and so emotionally manipulated I can't stop reading.