Book Review: THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE

Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

Publisher: Zola Books

Pages: 537

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐

I must confess that I couldn’t finish this book. I struggled to get to the 100-page mark. Until last year, I used to make it a point of plodding on through books I didn’t like, because I thought it wasn’t fair to the author. But starting this year, I’ve decided that life’s too short and there are too many books out there for me to do time with a book that just isn’t working for me.

The book is written in the first person present tense PoV of Clare and Henry. Because it is Henry doing the time travelling, there are more accounts of his first person than hers.

They first meet in October 1991 when he is 28 and she is 20. Over the years, they meet often at various periods. While Clare’s life proceeds in a linear fashion, Henry’s is all over the place. I found it hard to keep things straight in my head. The past and the future was all mixed up. Beyond a point, I couldn’t see any significance to the accounts of their time together.

Also, why did the author make him time travel naked? It forces him to spend time looking for clothes, and having to steal and break into places in order to get clothing or food. He materialises and de-materialises suddenly, without any agency or control, this we are told. Then how does he manage to show up so often in Clare’s time.

Sometimes in the course of his travels, he meets older or younger versions of himself, adding to our confusion.

Also, if it was Henry having all the adventures, why was the book called The Time Traveller’s Wife?

Maybe these were questions that would have been answered if I had read on, but I ran out of patience.

Both Henry and Clare sounded so alike, I had to keep checking to see whose PoV was on. 

The closeness between Henry and Clare, especially when she is in her teens and he is his 43-year-old self, made me cringe.

I laughed out loud at the metaphor for Henry’s erection: tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent.

The impossible love story would have been more meaningful if I had been able to care for the characters. I didn’t like either of them.

I might have liked the book more if there had been more emotion in it, and if it had been thinner.

Book Review: DOORWAY TO MURDER (BLACKWELL & WATSON TIME-TRAVEL MYSTERIES #1)

Title: Doorway to Murder (Blackwell and Watson Time-Travel Mysteries #1)

Author: Carol Pouliot

Publisher: Bridle Path Press

Pages: 294

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

This was a police procedural combined with a time travel mystery, sitting snug in the genre of a cozy mystery.

 

When the local bank is looted and the VP and branch manager of the bank found dead in the vault on the night of the worst blizzard in history in 1934, DS Steven Blackwell finds himself flustered by the complete lack of clues and the total lack of witnesses. While work poses a challenge, his home life is disrupted by the visions he sees at home of a strange woman dressed in odd clothing. Grief stricken after the sudden death of his mother, he thinks he is having hallucinations.

But the truth is that she is Olivia Watson, a researcher living in his house in 2014, and by some shift in time, they meet. Gradually a friendship develops between them.

 

At first the pace was very slow. Things look up once they meet.

There are a lot of characters in the first half of the book, and it is hard to keep track of their names.

Most of the action takes place in 1934. Steven and his team work hard but their efforts are slowed by the lack of modern tools and techniques.

The challenges of the Depression era were brought out well. In contrast, 2014 is rather bland. The only action here is Olivia telling her best friends about Steven.

The author also does a fantastic job of describing the setting, particularly with the element of the weather, in both eras.

Better editing could have improved the prose. The dialogue between the policemen was very unrealistic. Also, the character descriptions should have been done away with. After a while, one character begins to blend into another.

The best part of this time travel mystery for me was the understanding of how fascinating our technology is and how magical it might seem to someone from the past. Especially, the magic of TV and computers, printing, photography and mobile telephony.

I also enjoyed the references to books and films on various aspects of time travel. I loved the recommendations both to old favourites and to new authors.

 

What I found unbelievable and too pat an explanation was that the time shift had happened because both Steven and Olivia were both open to it.

But the book itself was warm and had a comfortable vibe to it.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.) 

Book Review: I AM NOT THIRTEEN

Title: I am not Thirteen
Author: AO Monk
Pages: 324
Publisher: Calhoun Press
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

In 2016, we meet Amy Snowberger, on the day before her birthday, as she is being held at knifepoint by her older sister, Leah, who is an addict. Escaping from her sister, she meets her best friend, Casssie, and they head to the home of her mother, who is living alone after the death of Amy’s father many years ago.

She wakes up on the morning of her birthday to find that while she has her mind and memories of her adult self in 2016, she is in the body of herself at age 13. What’s more, her father is very much alive. At first, she thinks it might be a dream, but when the dream shows no signs of ending, she panics and tries to run away from home, hoping the shock will end the dream and bring her back to 2016. Instead she finds herself in a questionable part of town where she encounters Claude Belissan, a man who might know more about her strange predicament than he is willing to admit.

Meanwhile, there are other challenges. Upset with her for running away, Mum threatens to send her to rehab camp.

Amy has the benefit of future knowledge regarding some of her classmates, but that doesn’t make middle school any less of a challenge. Eager to learn more and to find a way back to her real time, Amy’s investigation leads her to a man named Sebastian Spars whose grandiose dreams of being able to forge alternate realities were nurtured by his daughter Beatrice, who went on to run her own cult. And one of Amy’s close family members was a prominent member of that cult.

Eventually the cult loses steam, as Beatrice warns, We must not turn our eyes away from the stars to gaze adoringly at streetlights.

 

The story is presented in the first person present tense PoV of Amy, in 2003 and 2016.

There is a lot of psychaedelia, hippie culture, cultism and time travel, which is confusing for a while. The story is so complicated that I can’t say anything without giving away spoilers. All I can say is that like Amy, we struggle, sharing her confusion, as we try to figure out what glitch has caused her to return to 2003 and why the year itself is markedly different from the 2003 of her past, in which her father died as a result of unhealthy eating.

The chapters are named oddly, so there is no correlation between them, or so it seems. Ultimately, there was a resolution, just not the kind I had been hoping for. But the disappointment was offset by these words:

Tempus edax rerum -  time, devourer of all things. Every blade of grass will die, replaced or not replaced by another... And then what? Soon this planet will be void of life, spinning through empty space, without a soul to disturb its mountains, winds, and empty waters.

Only that isn't it -- not really. There is another force, above or outside of time, creating and recreating all things seen and unseen. An eternal negation of temporal decay... It's in the roses planted on a grave, the bees that feed from those roses, the honey and the honeycomb. It's in every creature's will to live and to make life.

(I read this book through NetGalley. Thank you, NetGalley, the author and the publisher.)