The TIme Travellers Wife - by Audrey Niffeneger

Ok, I think the fact that I saw the movie halfway through reading the book really colored my view of the book. It seems this happens most of the time. Either I read the book first and am dissappointed in the movie, or I see the movie first and then am either really pleasantly surprised with the book, or the movie gives everything away and the book ends up dragging. In this case, it was the latter.

If you've seen the movie, it only covers about half of the book. Oddly the half it didn't cover (the first half) was the half of the book that I enjoyed the most.

The book alternates from the perspective of both the Time Traveler (Henry) and his wife (Claire), although the first half of the book is set prior to their marriage with small snippets here and there that show their future. The movie shows little of that "backstory", but then again in this story it's not really back-story, since Henry only met Claire when she was younger AFTER he met her when he was older. For Claire it is back-story. She grows up knowing this strange man who appears in her forest naked, beginning when she is 6 years old. However, for Henry none of those visits occurred until after they had met when she was 20 and he was 28. Confused yet? Don't worry it all makes more sense in the book. The author does an amazing job of jumping through time without completely losing the reader.

The movie doesn't include much of that back-story and really starts when Henry meets Claire for the first time, and tells the story of their marriage. Of a woman who gets used to her husband just disappearing in the middle of things and being gone for hours or weeks at a time, with no idea of when he will return. I guess in a way it's much like the life of a wife of an FBI agent or spy, except that at least in those cases the wife usually gets some sort of warning.

Unfortunately, since I watched the movie when I was halfway through the book, I knew how it would end. Of course, they changed a few things for the book, but I was able to see where it was going. In some cases that makes a book easier for me to read, in this case it made it drag just a bit more. The book is rather long to begin with and there are bits and pieces that don't seem to fit, bits of story that seem to not have a reason for being. Many times those bits fit together later to fill in a piece of the puzzle of why something else happened, but often not. The last 50 or so pages I just wanted to be done with the book already, and I was really pissed off with the ending - this is a case where the movie ending was better than the book ending (while not really being all that different).

All in all, it is a good story and it's told well. It's worth reading but I doubt seriously I will read it again.