Reading this for the second time through revealed some of the clunkyness in the writing, some of the farfetched bits, some of the flaws, but did nothing to diminish my immediate connection with the characters and their unlikely story. Am glad I bought it.

I don’t think this book is one of the best of all time, but it’s definitely enjoying, and entertaining with an original concept. It’s a love story without being sappy or having a half naked couple on the cover. If you’re looking for a page-turner, this one is for you. The dialogue is very easy and the characters are well-developed.

Apparently this is being made into a movie. Sometimes I wish Hollywood would just leave good books alone!

I can’t believe that this was the author’s 1st book! Incredibly good. Interesting, smart, romantic. The type of book that makes you want to stay up all night reading. Loved it.

Some moments when the dialogue gets awkward and clunky, but an overall imaginative and entertainig story.

Enthralling. I don’t know how else to put it. Niffenegger draws the reader into this twisting chronologically absurd tale of two lives. The interspersed quotes and poems and lyrics though are really what impressed me. I usually don’t bother reading or at least don’t think clearly about that type of addition to a story line—but here it is beautiful and essential to fully experiencing this book. Beware: emotional and sad at times, but always expressing such an understanding of the human heart and mind…it will blow you away.

In general, I like time traveler stories and this one is no exception.

Henry has a genetic defect that allows him to time travel. It’s not nearly as glamorous as one might think, in fact, it’s usually dangerous and frightening! Henry cannot control his time travel, although he seems to only be drawn to locations that have an emotional significance to him. He arrives at his destination confused and without clothing. He normally needs to be able to run fast and steal in order to survive his trips through time.

Along Henry’s travels, he meets Clare. The most interesting thing about their relationship is that he meets her when she is six or seven and he is forty-three. He is coming from the future – a future in which they are married. Henry doesn’t meet Clare until he is 28. Although Clare has known Henry all her life, Henry has never seen her before.

This book really made me think about time travel. Sometimes the Henry of the future does or says something that will directly affect someone in the past. For example, in order to get his doctor to give him the time of day, the Henry of the future looked up the birth certificate of the doctor’s child, memorized the information and gave it to the Henry of the past in order to prove to the doctor that he could really time travel. What would have happened if Henry didn’t do that? What would be the outcome?

The author makes it clear that the past cannot be changed. Henry has lived through many things and has tried to change the past, but everything is concrete. You could imagine this would leave a person feeling helpless and a slave to their own future. Henry has stated that he thinks people have free-choice in their present, but when exactly IS the present?

Trying to change the past doesn’t work out. One day when Clare was a teenager and Henry was coming back from the future for a visit, she drew a sketch of Henry. While she was drawing, they were talking about how the past cannot be changed. When she finishes the sketch, she starts to put the date down in the lower right hand corner, however Henry stops her. He tells her that in the present, the sketch has no date on it. In order to test Henry’s theory, Clare puts the date on the sketch anyway to see what will happen.

When Henry gets back from that trip, he finds the sketch to see the date, however there still isn’t a date on it. When he asks Clare about it, she says she was paranoid that something might not go right or they might not ever meet, so trimmed the sketch to chop off the date.

So although they were trying to change the past to see its effect on the future, they couldn’t. In the past she had always put the date on the sketch and chopped it off. Henry had just assumed when he saw the sketch that it had never been dated.

I’m going to have to go through and read this book again to make all the connections between the past events and future events. The book is so circular and the author never seems to skip a beat. The story was funny and sad and romantic and filled with action.

I highly recommend it.

Any book that has a character teaching his five year old self how to picks locks and steal what he needs can’t be all bad. Romance and violence and nudity and a twist on the time travel gimmick that has not been done to death. This is up there with Stranger in a Strange Land and The Left Hand of Darkness, destine to be a classic.

If those two words have to be opposites…

At any rate, I thought this book was amazing. The love story aspect of it was incredibly romantic, playing with the destiny and free-will of the characters, and really driving the time travel. However, the time travel didn’t lose a bit of its scientific grounding, in fact, advancing a pretty interesting condition with a pretty interesting resolution.

Totally Worth It.

Great book. A bit slow in the 3rd quarter but builds to a satisfying end. Intelligent Science Fiction.