It made me weep

Last night I finished The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  CLOeey loaned it to me at our last meet-up after I complained about the The Reading Group, which my mom had loaned to me.  “It’s such a chick book.  Everyone is either divorced, unhappily married, or trying to deal with a philandering husband.  I have no idea why my mom loaned this to me.  It doesn’t even seem like something she’d read.”

The result is that I departed that evening with a cup of tea in one hand and The Time Traveller’s Wife in another.

I’m not sure how I feel about time travel as a plot device.  I know there are many people out there who hate it.  I don’t hate it, though I’m not sure how realistic it is to believe that you cannot ever affect a time-line, which seems to be how a lot of people approach the subject.  “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t do anything and you’ll be fine.”  Just by being there alters something that wasn’t there before.

But I digress…

I loved this book.  I could not put it down.  It sucked me in from the first sentence.  Time travelling is used to not only tell the story in the present, but also to give us the history of our protagonists, as well as foreshadow the end.  By the conclusion of the book, I knew what was going to happen, but I still wept as if it hadn’t already been revealed to me 50 pages earlier.

I loved the reverence the characters have for their crafts.  One is a librarian at the Newberry, and being a bibliophile I drooled over the descriptions of the building, books, and stacks.  The other is an artist, and a lot of time is spent describing the actual creative process she goes through.  Since I usually feel like a hack with my creations, it was fascinating to read about someone else’s works, even down the the technical details of material choice.

So pick this book up.  It will make you laugh, cry, crow with joy.  It’s 536 pages you will not regret reading.