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adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Chronic illness, Death, Infertility, Miscarriage, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Blood, Car accident, Death of parent, Alcohol
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Movie is so much better. The characters in the book were so unlikable and everything was weirdly sexual.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Miscarriage, Vomit
Moderate: Pedophilia, Suicide
Minor: Rape, Schizophrenia/Psychosis
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I feel like this book did age well.
TW: SA, R, Racism, Pedophila, Pregnancy Issues, etc.
this book is a collection of almost inappropriate moments- there’s almost pedophila, there’s almost rape, there IS sexual assuault imo, there’s almost racism (still unsure about this)
It just seems like the author is trying really hard to make Henry likable even when he does fucked up shit, which due to his condition one can’t really blame him for.
I liked the first half of this book a lot more than the second if you can overlook the crazy age gap and Henry and Clare’s strange relationship as she was growing up.
The second half of this book was just traumatic and depressing. No one needs that many descriptions of miscarriages and a stillbirth.
I’ll probably still watch the movie and the new TV show though lol
TW: SA, R, Racism, Pedophila, Pregnancy Issues, etc.
this book is a collection of almost inappropriate moments- there’s almost pedophila, there’s almost rape, there IS sexual assuault imo, there’s almost racism (still unsure about this)
It just seems like the author is trying really hard to make Henry likable even when he does fucked up shit, which due to his condition one can’t really blame him for.
I liked the first half of this book a lot more than the second if you can overlook the crazy age gap and Henry and Clare’s strange relationship as she was growing up.
The second half of this book was just traumatic and depressing. No one needs that many descriptions of miscarriages and a stillbirth.
I’ll probably still watch the movie and the new TV show though lol
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Body horror, Cancer, Child death, Cursing, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Homophobia, Infertility, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Violence, Vomit, Police brutality, Grief, Car accident, Death of parent, Pregnancy, Injury/Injury detail
Almost everything in this book was so graphic.
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So original and moving. I was hooked from the first page. Such a convincing love story and some beautiful characters. Adult/minor relationship was pretty weird and went unaddressed tho
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Death, Infertility, Miscarriage, Sexual content, Suicide, Car accident, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Pregnancy
Moderate: Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Drug use, Terminal illness, Alcohol
Minor: Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Vomit, Medical content, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail
grooming and making two references to Clare's and henry’s relationship being like Lolita and Humbert Humbert is not romantic
Content Warnings
Graphic: Miscarriage
Minor: Rape
I've meant to read this for a while. I'm glad I finally did but i don't feel like I've been missing much.
I have some mixed feelings. The characters are flawed and often unlikable. There are racial stereotypes, slur usage and the line of peodophila is walked very finely.
The dedication between Clare and Henry is strange - it never feels completely uninfluenced so it's hard to call it love. She meets him as a child and knows he'll be her husband so she builds her mental future around him. When they meet in his lifetime shes had decades of time in the lead up to decide how she'll get him when they finally line up.
It isn't romantic. It feels like grooming but the argument is that it's simply inevitable.
They're super horny but i can't say I was overall wooed by their courtship. Henry time travels, Clare waits. That is the dynamic perpetually.
There is some injuries described much more graphically then I'd anticipate or appreciate in this style of book. I wasn't expecting it to be like that.
Everything felt a bit doomed and tragic.
I have some mixed feelings. The characters are flawed and often unlikable. There are racial stereotypes, slur usage and the line of peodophila is walked very finely.
The dedication between Clare and Henry is strange - it never feels completely uninfluenced so it's hard to call it love. She meets him as a child and knows he'll be her husband so she builds her mental future around him. When they meet in his lifetime shes had decades of time in the lead up to decide how she'll get him when they finally line up.
It isn't romantic. It feels like grooming but the argument is that it's simply inevitable.
They're super horny but i can't say I was overall wooed by their courtship. Henry time travels, Clare waits. That is the dynamic perpetually.
There is some injuries described much more graphically then I'd anticipate or appreciate in this style of book. I wasn't expecting it to be like that.
Everything felt a bit doomed and tragic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Miscarriage, Blood, Car accident, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Infertility, Racial slurs, Toxic relationship, Violence, Medical trauma, Pregnancy
Minor: Rape
adventurous
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Rape, Sexual content, Death of parent
Time travel, romance, sci fi, family
emotional
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Better than I thought it would be, but not as good as I hoped it would be once I got into it. It's very interesting to read a fucked up relationship develop from the perspective of the people in it. They do love each other, but they're also overly dependent, unhealthy, and don't communicate well. They are the only people who understand each other, but it is because they have both engineered it to be so. On some level they both know the relationship is doomed, but they don't want to be without each other.
I found the way the author handled time travel interesting, especially the implications of Clare'sdeja vu moments, and the sketch with the trimmed date . The underlying terror that Henry almost constantly feels permeates the book, and one of the unvoiced stumbling blocks of their relationship is that Clare never really seems to understand that fear - evidenced by the fact that she so desires to have a child that will likely have the same terrible condition . The way Niffenegger's chosen to depict this story and time travel unfortunately means that the reader never really gets to sit with these characters, and by the end of the book I still felt like I didn't really know them, just their relationship. I wish the book was more narrow in scope, or gave us more insight into what Clare and Henry are like apart. The Time Traveler's Wife is a compelling title, but the book is not about Clare, it's entirely about Clare and Henry's relationship with everything else serving as set dressing.
Overall enjoyed and would recommend. Sometimes the descriptions and references get a little self-indulgent and pretentious, but seeing this complex relationship evolve from the perspective of two incredibly biased narrators was always interesting and page-turning. Also,fuck you Gomez. Cherisse, why the fuck did you marry that man, let alone have kids with him. Yikes . I had to list so many content warnings and I didn't even get them all.
I found the way the author handled time travel interesting, especially the implications of Clare's
Overall enjoyed and would recommend. Sometimes the descriptions and references get a little self-indulgent and pretentious, but seeing this complex relationship evolve from the perspective of two incredibly biased narrators was always interesting and page-turning. Also,
Content Warnings
Graphic: Miscarriage
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gun violence, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Violence, Grief, Car accident, Death of parent, Pregnancy, Alcohol
Minor: Domestic abuse, Fatphobia, Gore, Homophobia, Infidelity, Mental illness, Rape, Sexual content, Terminal illness, Violence, Vomit, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Where do I even begin with this book. I had no intention of ever reading this, because I have seen the basic gist in way too much of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who writing (derogatory). My book club picked it for this month and I decided to slog my way through.
Reader, it was just as bad as I imagined. Reading interviews with the author somehow made it worse. She says in a modern interview regarding Steven Moffat's own TV series version of this book (you'd think he'd get tired of creating the same story over and over again) that the reader is *supposed* to be uncomfortable with the idea of adult Henry visiting child Clare repeatedly, but then in other interviews describes Henry as "there's not going to be some fabulous perfect soulmate out there for me, so I'll just make him up", so which is it, Audrey?
My biggest issue with this book is that I didn't care a single bit about either of our main characters. Clare is effectively a cardboard cut-out that has a trauma porn life journey but we never see any of the consequences. Imagine basically any of the big-T traumas that a wealthy beautiful woman in Chicago might undergo, and Clare lives it. Are we ever inside her head long enough to feel her grapple with these things? No. Because the entire focus of this book is about the time travel schtick. We are instead shown scenes that are gruesome and difficult for the reader to read, but that seem to just be par for the course for Clare, because she always just seems to be fine and solely focused on Henry at the expense of literally anything else. Henry's internal monologue is absolutely insufferable. I nearly threw my phone across the room and quit when he described his erection as "tall enough to ride an amusement park ride without a parent" in the first thirty pages of the book. I couldn't find myself caring about Henry or his struggles at any point because I was too busy making increasingly horrified grimaces at the things that he was thinking, often about an actual child.
And then there's the time travel schtick itself. I *LOVE* time travel stories. I've read gobs of Doctor Who/Torchwood fanfiction that incorporate timey-wimey stuff, ranging from silly nonsense to deeply thoughtful explorations of the concepts that I still think about. But I kept getting so caught up on the inconsistencies and the "y tho" about the way the author constructed this. Did she only make it that he time travels naked so that there was the creepy ick factor of child Clare finding him that way? The hand-wavey in universe explanation for why he consistently goes back and visits child Clare just didn't make sense to me. There's a running joke in Doctor Who about the fact that of all the places on planet Earth, and the broader solar system and universe, why is the crisis ALWAYS in London, and this felt like an even more egregious and nonsensical version of that. They talk about the danger of him driving a car or flying in a plane but then have him walking around with a baby on his shoulders. Life is so dangerous for him when he travels that he has to know how to pick locks and fight, but somehow he isn't WELL KNOWN in the city of Chicago? How would it not be a news story the FIRST time this happens that a man disappears in public before people's very eyes leaving a pile of clothes behind, or that a man appears on the middle of a sidewalk out of nowhere completely naked? If he keeps time traveling in and out of the same places and times, why does he not do a better job taking care of himself with caches of supplies and hidden keys than just trusting a six year old to keep clothes for him? Nothing about this story makes sense actually.
All in all I hated this book just as much as I expected to. I don't normally make myself read 500+ page/16+ hour books that I hate, but you can't leave ratings on a DNF, so I finished the whole thing out of spite.
Reader, it was just as bad as I imagined. Reading interviews with the author somehow made it worse. She says in a modern interview regarding Steven Moffat's own TV series version of this book (you'd think he'd get tired of creating the same story over and over again) that the reader is *supposed* to be uncomfortable with the idea of adult Henry visiting child Clare repeatedly, but then in other interviews describes Henry as "there's not going to be some fabulous perfect soulmate out there for me, so I'll just make him up", so which is it, Audrey?
My biggest issue with this book is that I didn't care a single bit about either of our main characters. Clare is effectively a cardboard cut-out that has a trauma porn life journey but we never see any of the consequences. Imagine basically any of the big-T traumas that a wealthy beautiful woman in Chicago might undergo, and Clare lives it. Are we ever inside her head long enough to feel her grapple with these things? No. Because the entire focus of this book is about the time travel schtick. We are instead shown scenes that are gruesome and difficult for the reader to read, but that seem to just be par for the course for Clare, because she always just seems to be fine and solely focused on Henry at the expense of literally anything else. Henry's internal monologue is absolutely insufferable. I nearly threw my phone across the room and quit when he described his erection as "tall enough to ride an amusement park ride without a parent" in the first thirty pages of the book. I couldn't find myself caring about Henry or his struggles at any point because I was too busy making increasingly horrified grimaces at the things that he was thinking, often about an actual child.
And then there's the time travel schtick itself. I *LOVE* time travel stories. I've read gobs of Doctor Who/Torchwood fanfiction that incorporate timey-wimey stuff, ranging from silly nonsense to deeply thoughtful explorations of the concepts that I still think about. But I kept getting so caught up on the inconsistencies and the "y tho" about the way the author constructed this. Did she only make it that he time travels naked so that there was the creepy ick factor of child Clare finding him that way? The hand-wavey in universe explanation for why he consistently goes back and visits child Clare just didn't make sense to me. There's a running joke in Doctor Who about the fact that of all the places on planet Earth, and the broader solar system and universe, why is the crisis ALWAYS in London, and this felt like an even more egregious and nonsensical version of that. They talk about the danger of him driving a car or flying in a plane but then have him walking around with a baby on his shoulders. Life is so dangerous for him when he travels that he has to know how to pick locks and fight, but somehow he isn't WELL KNOWN in the city of Chicago? How would it not be a news story the FIRST time this happens that a man disappears in public before people's very eyes leaving a pile of clothes behind, or that a man appears on the middle of a sidewalk out of nowhere completely naked? If he keeps time traveling in and out of the same places and times, why does he not do a better job taking care of himself with caches of supplies and hidden keys than just trusting a six year old to keep clothes for him? Nothing about this story makes sense actually.
All in all I hated this book just as much as I expected to. I don't normally make myself read 500+ page/16+ hour books that I hate, but you can't leave ratings on a DNF, so I finished the whole thing out of spite.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Infertility, Miscarriage, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Cancer, Cursing, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gun violence, Infertility, Miscarriage, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicide, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Car accident, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Pregnancy, Abandonment, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail, Classism
Moderate: Racism