Overview:
What do you do when you meet the love of your life when you're six years old? And he's 36, but he's really only eight years older than you are? If you're Clare Abshire, you wait for each of his visits throughout the years until you meet him in real time.
Henry DeTamble is a time traveler, although not by choice. A genetic mutation causes him to spontaneously travel through time, disappearing from view, leaving behind his clothes and possessions, and arriving naked in another time and another place. For the most part, this is a curse. Henry often has to turn to petty crime to feed and clothe himself when he travels, and must run from people, thugs, or the police. Eventually Henry returns to his present time, bringing only the bodily injuries he's suffered back with him. Sometimes he travels back in time and visits an earlier version of himself. One of the places to which he travels often is the meadow behind Clare's house, and throughout her younger years, Clare meets him there and falls in love with him.
The Time Traveler's Wife follows the story of their lives mostly in a straightforward chronology, at least from Clare's perspective. She's a child and then a teenager with their secret rendezvous throughout the years in the meadow. Henry first visited her at an older age, so he knew the dates that the earlier versions of himself would visit the older versions of Clare. She kept clothes hidden for him in the meadow and sometimes hid him in a basement room of her house. He was her big secret that she always kept to herself. How could she explain the presence of an older man who traveled through time to be with her? As a teenager, she was rumored to be a lesbian since she had no romantic interest in boys.
The novel is titled The Time Traveler's Wife, but as Clare realizes, her life is so intertwined with Henry's that it's his story also. The story is told in first-person narration from both Henry and Clare. Each section begins with the date and the ages of Clare and Henry, and sometimes multiple ages for Henry when more than one version of him is present. This allows us to see their lives from both their perspectives, to see Clare's fear every time Henry leaves or how his actions in the past or future affect her life in real time, and to see Henry's struggles to cope with his "illness" while trying to remain safe and keep the secrets that he shouldn't reveal to anyone.
The Time Traveler's Wife is also more than a love story between two people. It explores all the relationships of their lives: their parents, families, friends, and ex-lovers. My only complaint is that, whether a realistic depiction or not, love in this novel is something from which recovery never seems to happen. Henry's father mourns his beloved wife to the point that it cripples and debilitates him. Ingrid, Henry's old girlfriend, despairs to the point of suicide about losing Henry to Clare. Everyone loves with such a passion that there is no middle ground, no loved and lost and grown from the experience.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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