Red’s Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This is a romance cloaked in the science fiction trope of time traveling. The genre might be perfect for the trope because it allows the author to gloss over some of the icky specifics of how the time travelling occurs. Her approach is to make it a genetic disorder, one the traveler cannot control. The chaos this creates leads to his relationship with Clare. She meets him first, she as a child and him as a man in his thirties and forties. In his linear timeline, he doesn’t meet her until his mid-to-late twenties. This allows for a book in two halves where first he has the advantage of knowing all the things to come in their relationship, and then she reverses that advantage as he experiences her childhood moments while they are married. Eventually this leads to a point – clearly the conclusion. I thought this was an original book, but one that finished with a cliché. That’s where the romance genre probably hurts this for me. Romances often end with a cliché. I was hoping for a little more.

Up next: Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin