I thought time travel would be exciting....

We'll I guess it was kind of exciting... a naked guy showing up all over time. Sure. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger seems to be either LOVED or HATED by the readers, but all agree the time traveling itself was a great starting point. It sold me anyway. That and it was highly recommended by my sister claiming "it's super fast! It's all dialog!" For me, it was neither.

I wasn't as impressed as she had been; I was bored. Even pretended to check a watch while reading through 3 rounds of pool (in which everyone played well of course). The novel is full of a lot of unnecessary detail about what's going on in and around a scene, but then there's little to no detail about the characters themselves, other than how they were clothed or wore their hair.

Backstory details such as family history and sexual encounters were brought up as they seemed to be very important to the plot in some way, but no solid picture was painted. Examples include Clare's history with her mother... uh, I guess her mother suffered from depression. We meet her at Clare's family Christmas party where she makes a "scene" while the family gossips behind her back, but yeah that's the last of ma'. And Henry was supposed to be a completely different person before Clare - he was a heavy drinker and man-whore, but neither of these traits are concretely developed for the reader. We just have to accept that he was a bad-bad boy before *sigh* Clare!

There were other little details that bugged me, but nothing more than the novel's (excessive) length. Now that I reflect back on the book, that's probably the point since the story is about transcending time. According to my borrowed copy's reading group guide, there was a heavy theme of "waiting". Yes... I was waiting for the book to just end. I was waiting for something to happen. Neither of the protagonists needed to wait for anything: Clare had a pre-determined list of the couple's future encounters and Henry was just off doing his own thing, acting as a human fortune cookie. I think the better word for this book's theme would be "slow." How does Henry keep the the story running around in a loop? How does Clare "patiently" wait for Henry, knowing all too well that she will one day commit herself to this person?

Not to frighten anyone with a spoiler-alert, (in case you could guess from the title,) there is no "Wife" until half way through the novel! The book is almost 600 pages... yeah that's a whole lot of not-much-going-on. The second half of the novel does read a bit faster because there is some more exciting activity Based on that fact, I felt that the book didn't need to be more than 300 pages. I think it took me a month to get through this. I know there are a bunch of readers out there that just PLOWED through, but like my sister they either: A. have a true love-story relative to the plot, or B. saw the movie before reading. I recommend the latter - skip the book for the film, then read the book if the plot really interests you.

I was bored, but the writing is okay, so Niffenegger gets some credit for that: 2/5 Stars.