Three Stars - I Liked It
I finished this book a few weeks ago and have been procrastinating a review because I’m pretty sure my review will be vastly different than most people’s. Although who knows? Maybe other people agree with me but haven’t said so just to go with the flow. So here goes.
I’m giving this book three stars. It kind of sat in the middle of “I liked it” and “It was OK”, so I rounded up.
Henry and Clare are in love. They have been since the first two times. First, when she was 6 and he was 36, then again when she was 20 and he was 28, for you see, Henry is a time traveler. This is their story where the past, present, and future do not always occur in that order and constantly collide, testing the strength of Clare and Henry’s love and their faith in each other.
Side Note: I think I like my little description better than the actual book jacket.
First of all, this is a book about time travel which is technically Science Fiction and I have always struggled with Sci-Fi. Most time traveling stories leave me with a lot of unanswered questions and generally confused overall. Except for J.K. Rowling’s Time-Turner in Harry Potter 3, that actually made sense. The wearer was simply rewinding time AND they could change things without affecting the entire space-time-continuum (whatever that actually is). And I digress.
Niffenegger does a pretty good job of laying out the rules and explaining how it all worked. The largest jump she asks you to take is in accepting that Henry’s traveling is triggered by something genetic inside of him which physically moves him though time. There is no outside force or item (like the Delorian or Hermione’s Time-Turner) , just him. I struggle a little with this point and I can’t say exactly why. It’s not that I disagree with it, I simply have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
But she did directly answer one of the things that had been bugging me for most of the book. Henry is usually spending more time in the past than the amount of time that passes in his present, i.e. he would be in the past for two or three days, yet only a few hours would have passed when he returned to his present. So how old is he really? Physically he has lived longer than his present would indicate. (I’m confusing myself just thinking about it and I know what I’m trying to say!) Anyway, Niffenegger dosen’t answer this question, but at one point Henry himself wonders how old he is physically, which made me think that at least she recognized that it would be a problem.
My second issue is that I just never connected with the book. In all fairness, this might be a “It’s Not You, It’s Me”situation, where my personal issues at the moment kept me from making a real emotional connection with these characters, and had I read it at another time I might have felt differently. Or maybe it is just the book, who knows. But I just never bonded with any of the characters to a point where I really, really cared about them. At times I even disliked them, mainly Henry and Clare.
I just have to say quickly that yes, I realize how blasphemous this is going to seem to a lot of you because I know A LOT of people who absolutely love this book. So I’m sorry, please don’t hate me.
SPOILERS BELOW
The romantic aspect of the story is that once Henry has met Clare in his present she becomes so important to him that he is drawn to her past and future as he travels. But, he only goes out and falls in love with her because that is what she said is supposed to happen because that’s what he told her would happen in the past. So in Clare’s past Henry is the one who knows everything and tells her that they’re in love, then, when the meet in Henry and Clare’s present, she is the one who knows everything even though he has never met her because he hasn’t traveled to her past yet. It’s all a giant circle of confusion.
I do find the idea that her love for him had such an impact that his need to be near her continually pulled him into her past. Who wouldn’t want a love that powerful? It all just comes back to me not liking the characters. Overall, Clare is okay. She’s a privileged rich kid who goes to college to become a paper artist. She makes sculptures out of paper. Now, I have actually seen some pretty amazing paper sculptures, but I can not think of a more perfect major in college and profession for a rich kid to pursue thank paper sculpting, I just found that sort of funny. There were also a few times where the author goes into quite a bit of detail on paper making and sculpting, which I felt were unnecessary and just completely unrelated to the story in general. Those parts really slowed things down and pulled me out of the story.
Here are my two main issues with Clare. One, when she first meets him in their present, she’s just instantly in love with him even though, at that time, he is a drunken, womanizing, drug-experimenting, jerk of a librarian. Up to that point she was in love with the Henry she knew from her past, the Henry of the future, who she had really only spent maybe a week’s worth of time with in her life, and who had been very careful to never reveal too much of himself to her. She was in love with an ideal Henry, not the guy standing in front of her. I think there should have been a bit more of a reality check for her once they actually met. More struggle in reconciling the two Henry’s. There’s also a scene where Henry from the past is having sex with Clare while present Henry is asleep in the same bed. A little weird for me.
And two, she sleeps with her best friend’s husband!!! I’ll admit, I didn’t completely hate her after this, but what am I supposed to do with this info except think she’s kind of a selfish … witch. Her best friend has taken her daughter out to try and help them both get over the loss of Henry (that’s right, he dies, I warned that there would be spoilers) and Clare sleeps with her husband, in their house, on their kitchen table. And this is the SECOND time she has cheated with him, the first time Clare was not yet with Henry and her friends were dating, but yeah, that’s still cheating. That’s a pretty big black smudge on your character. So she slept with her BFFs husband, and used him because she knew he was in love with her, all just to make herself feel better. Not. Cool.
Henry. Henry’s kind of a slimeball until Clare straightens him out a little bit. He’s a total womanizer who drops his on-again off-again girlfriend like a hot rock as soon as Clare shows up, completely destroying her life and even witnesses, possibly causes, her suicide. That’s really my only big issue with him. He’s kind of hard to connect to and I felt like he was sort of stand-offish to me as a reader in a way, but I think that is how he would actually be if he were a real person, because of his life experiences. He grew up kind of parent-less after his mother died and his father mentally checked-out, and he had some really rough experiences as he time traveled which have all had a part in creating who he is as a man.
I spent a lot of the book mad at Henry for not being willing to try and alter events and change the future. He was willing to “play” the stock market and lottery in order to provide a living for himself and Clare, but he would never try to alter events or change things. This especially bothered me once it became clear that he was going to die. Why wouldn’t he want to change that so he could be with Clare and they could raise their daughter together? It made no sense to me until I tried to look at it solely from Henry’s point of view. Henry has lost his feet at this point which he earlier described as the most important thing he had when he traveled, they were his only means of escape and they kept him alive. When he traveled without his feet he was trapped. He is depressed, lost, and now completely terrified of traveling and the only way for him to end the traveling is to die. So rather than try to change events, he simply decides to accept and almost welcomes his death. Even then it’s not like he’s really dead because he can travel from the past to visit.
There are so many other things I would like to hash out about this book but this has already gotten way too long as it is. So to wrap things up, I think I like the book better after writing this review, but I still only like it, I don’t love it.
