A review by amandagstevens
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Did not finish book. Stopped at 11%.

There's no way I would enjoy another 470 pages of this. Past the ten percent mark, I still have no sense of who these characters are beyond their academic prowess, and the frequent art/poetry/music/etc references don't show up organically. Somehow both Clare's voice and Henry's (which are pretty much the same voice) feel pretentious even when I'm reading about their insecurities. And Henry's voice does not read even slightly male. And the dialogue is off somehow (maybe all those voices are the same, too?). And then there's the romance, which I did not expect to feel so ... warped.

The book blurb reveals these two meet when Henry is thirty-six and Clare is six. I guess I should have realized what I was getting into. Clare grows up encountering a naked adult man in the meadow behind her house, providing him clothes and guessing by the time she's twelve that he is going to marry her in her future (his past).

On her eighteenth birthday, forty-one-year-old Henry shows up, and as agreed, now that she's a legal adult, they have sex. Eventually they meet in his present for the first time (now aged twenty and twenty-eight) and he has no idea who she is. She's amazed at how young he is. He's amazed that she grew up knowing an older version of him. They have sex.

And the romance is born ... reborn ... whatever. I just can't get into this. I can't forget that this Henry is going to go back in time years later and meet her at six years old knowing what it's like to have sex with her when she's eighteen and twenty and ...

I went ahead and read spoilers and I'm glad I stopped now.