I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to, but I liked things about it. It’s a very engaging book, and I always found myself listening to multiple hours of it at a time, so it sucked me in. I listened to the audiobook, so if I spell a character's name wrong, please ignore that.

This is an interesting use of time travel since it’s very cyclical. Time travel in this universe can’t change the past or the future. Everything happens in a particular way because it always has to. For example, Henry visits himself in the past because when he was little, an older version of Henry visited him at that age, and there is no “first time” Henry travels. The future is already written, but the characters don’t feel like they lack free will, and I don’t think this rule strips them of too much agency. It’s different from other sci-fi I like, but it’s not bad. It leans into themes about fate and destiny and the inevitable.

The romance was nice sometimes, but I wish a good chunk of this wasn’t about a kid falling in love with a forty-year-old man. We get a lot of Clare’s point of view when she’s growing up and getting visits from future Henry. It feels like she loves him because he’s familiar (she has known him for as long as she can remember). He’s always been this exciting, mysterious, secret, loving visitor. I understand teenagers can have crushes on adults, but the amount of time Henry spends with the child version of his wife is odd to me anyway. They’re gonna interact no matter what which isn’t his fault, but he chooses to hang out with her, and by the time she’s sixteen, she already knows they’ll marry. If I were Henry, I’d want to avoid Clare since she’s been freaked out by time travel enough. I wouldn’t wanna give her too much information, and neither does he, but that clearly doesn’t stop her from figuring it out since they talk so often. She has a couple of existential crises about whether or not Henry’s real and how her choices don’t matter if her future has already been decided. It’s a lot to put on someone, so I don’t like how Henry handles it. Also, even if that’s your future wife, why are you kissing the sixteen-year-old and calling yourself her boyfriend? You’re being weird, and you know you’re making her wait for you constantly. She doesn’t deserve that.

From the title, I expected this to start with their lives as a married couple, but it takes a bit to get there. It introduces interesting ideas about how to make a relationship work when one person’s life is so unpredictable. I went into this expecting to see how Clare copes with him disappearing without notice, how their love keeps them together despite the risk he’s always in, and how Henry struggles to survive and make sense of it all. This book has that, and not every question I had was answered, but I think it delivered on the premise.

A lot of Clare’s journey is about waiting for Henry, and it’s too bad we don’t get much outside of that. Her entire life is shaped by him, and she never escapes it or wishes to. Even when he wants her to have her own life and be happy, we don’t see if that happens. So much of Clare revolves around Henry, but it doesn’t feel like that’s all there is to her in the author’s mind. She has a passion for art, but this trait doesn’t make her feel as fleshed out as Henry, unfortunately. Clare isn’t super likable when I think about her for long enough. She has a rich family with a Mammy stereotype servant, and none of her friends are very good people, so I don’t know why she likes them. She stays in touch with the mean woman who’s attracted to Henry’s ex, and I could not explain to you why. It bothers me that two men cheat on their partners with Clare, and she doesn’t feel very bad about it. With one guy, she feels it’s justified and isn’t mad at him for not telling her he was dating someone. With the other guy, Clare knows it’s wrong, but it happens anyway, and I have no idea how she speaks to his girlfriend/wife again without shame. I don’t know if she ever apologizes or if the girlfriend/wife finds out, and it’s just kind of weird how little it was addressed when they’re supposed to be her friends. Clare also dislikes it when Henry cheats once to win the lottery, but it’s good she manages to get over that because it gives them a comfortable life. In another part of the book, Clare says adopting a baby would be cheating and that it wouldn’t feel real. That’s why she wants to give birth to her own child even though doing that with Henry risks giving someone time travel genes that might kill them. I just don’t share Clare’s values and get annoyed with her.

Sometimes, I felt like this might’ve been too long. Even though so many things happen in their lives that fill this book, it seemed too long for a romance, and I almost wanted an antagonist to be introduced so there’d be more to do. The book dives into their relationship, the people they know, and how Henry keeps his condition a secret, and we see the good and bad things they go through in their busy lives. But with how many hours were in the audiobook, I occasionally wondered if the doctor or Gomez would become the villain, so the antagonist wasn’t just Henry’s messed up DNA. That doesn’t happen, but I don’t think it had to... For whatever reason, despite a lot of events taking place, the book felt like it lacked plot, and I don’t know how to explain that.

I like the foreshadowing the author used. Since Henry goes to random points in time, we can get glimpses of the future through him as we follow events chronologically, which feels fun. It gave us hints to think about before they came true and finally made sense. I also enjoyed the scenes where Henry mentors himself as a kid, and I wish there were more moments like that.

I think there were missed opportunities at the beginning of their relationship. I would’ve liked to see more emphasis on Clare falling in love with him all over again for new, unexpected reasons because he’s different from his future self. We learn that she’s comfortable with Henry in the present because he’s familiar, but mainly, she’s happy because she knows where he lives and he freely answers personal questions in the present. That makes sense, but I think there could’ve been more build-up from that. Initially, it felt like Clare was comparing present Henry to a ten years older Henry who she likes better, and she’s waiting for him to get to know her and age so he’ll become that person. I wish there was a moment where she specifically thought about how she loved both versions separately. I also think Henry’s love for her was rushed, and it would’ve been nice to have a moment where he realizes why future him loves Clare. I wanted more emphasis on how even if he didn’t learn they’d get married on the first date, he’d still realize he loves her independently. I don’t think his love is fake or a choice based on his knowledge of the future; I just think it went from meeting to being fully in love without a lot of development in between.

The romance is written sweetly, and it’s not intended to be creepy, but the sections that slowly went through Clare’s childhood/teenage years weren’t fun for me. It made me think he was kind of grooming her, but since the author doesn’t see it that way, it felt confusing. In general, I think it’s a red flag if the text manages to compare itself to Lolita twice. Maybe if your characters can liken the romantic male lead and Humbert Humber the child molester, that’s a bad sign, and something should've been rewritten.

There were some unresolved aspects with the side characters. Gomez and Charise had problems that never fully got explored or settled. Charise knows Gomez is in love with Clare, she has children with him, and the only thing they seem to have in common is they’re anarchists. This makes their relationship feel confused and unstable, and aside from a single scene where Charise talks about this, his noncommitment is never resolved. I don’t know why these two are married. I don’t even know if Gomez is in love with his wife or if he married her to have a placeholder for Clare. While I’m talking about Gomez, I don’t understand why Henry likes him either. They seem to be friends, and Gomez might help him often with the time travel stuff, but I didn’t recognize enough of that to accept their friendship. Every time Gomez speaks, he’s just being a dick, and he’s waiting for Henry to leave so he can have sex with Clare and ruin his family. That alone should give Henry a reason to hate Gomez, but I don’t think he does. Gomez is awful, and each time he makes a move on Clare, she’s either drunk and can’t consent or grieving and desperate for connection. How Clare continues to choose to be around him is beyond me.

Henry’s circumstances are hard to believe since he manages to keep a single job for many years despite being caught naked at work several times without explanation. He says he can’t control when/where he goes except it’s clear he subconsciously chooses to go somewhere fun when he’s six, he revisits his parents when they were happy, and he visits child Clare after they meet in the present. It makes me wonder if his view of time travel is entirely true. It doesn’t seem like he tries to make a difference that often, so maybe the fact that he accepts his fate allows his future to play out the way it does. There’s a lot of talk about Henry being a womanizer in his past, but aside from his ex-girlfriend Ingrid, we don’t explore why or how he was like that because he never acts that way with Clare. Ingrid was...there just like many side characters I didn’t know that well. I’m not sure what the point of her was, and besides three or four people, the side characters don’t feel like they matter. The main characters are selfish in different ways and not fully unlikable, but not likable enough for me.

I didn’t know a lot about the book going into it, so when they started cursing and we got sex scenes, I was surprised. It’s not as graphic as other books are, but keep in mind that there are sex scenes and they’re not all fade to black if you don’t like that. I didn’t enjoy how they were written, and one of them is this barely legal type of scene about Clare losing her virginity which annoyed me. While I’m talking about stuff that would probably fit in a content warning, there are detailed descriptions of miscarriages, the graphic death of a parent, and an unnecessary part about amputation. Basically all of the uncomfortable things I’d complain about in the book are either left out or altered in the movie adaptation to make it less complicated and dramatic. In both the book and the movie, we don’t get closure about the treatment he tried to get for his condition, and there is no solution to whether or not the time-traveling gene can be cured. In the book, Henry makes Clare wait for him for decades after he's gone, and we don't know if she was ever satisfied without him, so it's too bitter and not sweet enough for me. Plus, I don't like how Alba's fate is a mystery. None of the future is shown aside from a single scene, so we skip many important parts that could’ve talked about how the characters have been living all these years.

Watching the movie gives you the gist of this story without all the creepy and messy parts, but you could read the book to understand more about the side characters they cut out/didn’t focus on if you want to. Henry’s dad’s landlady, Clare’s family’s servants, Henry’s drug dealer, Clare’s “friend” and colleagues…They don’t show up in the movie, and I understand why they toned other things down because it didn’t need to be like that. But even the movie with its more positive ending feels average, so eh.

The Time Traveler's Wife - Likewise Book Reviews

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