I think I can reasonably say The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. If you read my own writing, you might notice I have a thing for well-done age differences in relationships, modern time travel romance, and especially, the idea of meeting your soulmate young. But I was hesitant to read this book. Why? I don’t typically read adult fiction, and when I do, I rarely enjoy it. But I bought this book at our local library book sale a couple of years ago, and it eventually made its way into my to-read pile. I decided it was finally time to see how the book compared to the movie.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is told through the points of view of Henry DeTamble, a man who spontaneously travels in time, and Clare Abshire, the woman who will eventually be his wife. Clare meets Henry for the first time when she is six-years-old in The Meadow behind her parents’ home, and continues to meet with him there 151 more times as she grows from a child into a young woman, falling in love with him pretty early on. Henry, however, meets Clare for the first time when he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. She tells him about her past (his future) and the future together that older Henry had eventually told her about. This is where the book begins, and it follows these two characters back and forth in time through their life together.

I loved being able to see more of Henry and Clare together through the book. How their relationship moved through her childhood and into her teens and the ways it shifted over that. How he became more open with her and affectionate, but still drew a line of how far things should go. I love the idea of two people being so intertwined. Soulmates. To continue to watch their triumphs and tragedies play out over their lives was fascinating and something I don’t normally see in my preferred genre.

Unlike other adult fiction I’ve read, even when I didn’t personally relate to what they were going through, I almost always still felt connected to their joy and pain. The writing also flowed very well, I feel, in comparison to other adult fiction I’ve read, which often seems distant from the emotional core of the story and more concerned with describing things in as much detail as possible than actually using their words to say something meaningful. Occasionally, Henry and Clare’s references to classic art, poetry, and fiction lost me. But that’s mostly my own shortcoming. My point is that the emotional heart of this book stayed very central and didn’t get lost in the technical nature of writing a complicated time travel story. I don’t feel that a reader would need to have any interest in Sci-Fi or Fantasy to enjoy this book.

I guess the main problem I have with this book is that I just didn’t like young Henry. By that, I mean teenager/early twenties Henry. I get that he’s supposed to be sort of lost, which sometimes results in heavy drinking, drugs, and meaningless sexual encounters, but I just don’t enjoy reading about that. I think the author was trying to make Henry a realistic average young man, but some of the ways she tried to express that were flat-out unnecessary, in my opinion. To be frank, I didn’t always care about Henry’s personal journey. I cared about his relationship with Clare. And I cared about Clare’s journey, because her sense of knowing what she wanted from a young age is far more relatable to me.

I guess it frustrates me that you always see stories where the girl is the one waiting and the guy has had lots of sexual experience, mostly without any real meaning attached to it. Yes, I get it, Henry - very few people meet their soulmates at age six. And isn’t it romantic that a guy who’s very lost finds a reason to change and become a better person through a relationship? Maybe. But I’ve seen that many times before, and it doesn’t speak to me the way it used to. It was painful to me on a personal level to watch Clare have to deal with the fact that the guy she was actually in a relationship with was not quite the guy she fell in love with. Yet.

Still, that problem only existed in a small portion of the book, and there were enough wonderful interactions between young Clare and older Henry to keep me captivated through it. Regardless of my issues with the “realism” of certain sexual encounters throughout the book, I adore the love story of Clare and Henry. I loved it from the moment I started reading the book, and while I was influenced by my love of the movie, I feel like I would have loved it anyway. Rewatching the movie right after finishing the book, I also found the movie to be an excellent adaptation, and from the interviews on the DVD, I believe it was because everyone involved was trying to bring as much of the book through as possible. And it showed. So even if my affinity for Clare and Henry’s story didn’t start with the book, I believe it was influenced by it every step of the way.

I had a very strong reaction to this book, both positive and negative. But for the most part, I’d say the positive won out. It hits some triggers, but it also fulfills some positive quirks. I guess you could say even the parts that bothered me affected me so much because I was so personally invested in this story. And it’s the kind of story you’re just not going to find anywhere else.

The Time Traveler's Wife - Likewise Book Reviews

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