Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Unlike a lot of the other critics of this book, I didn't have a problem with the idea that a six-year-old Clare could fall in love with a forty-year-old Henry. I didn't have a problem with Henry breaking into places or all that other stuff either. But I had MANY problems with this book. One of the main problems I have with this book is brilliantly exemplified on page 392 -- the date, September 11th, 2001: "Henry says, 'Wake up, Clare.' I open my eyes. The television picture swerves around. A city street. A sky. A white skyscraper on fire. An airplane, toylike, slowly flies into the second white tower. Silent flames shoot up. Henry turns up the volume. 'Oh my God,' says the voice of the television. 'Oh my God.'" ... And then this event is never referred to ever again. The story does not take place in New York, nor does 9/11 bear any kind of noticeable emotional impact upon any of the characters in any way. And yet this paragraph is in the book anyway. Why? Good question -- I'd like to know too. But this is only the most typified example of the author's compulsive habit of putting in useless subplots and shallow tangents into the book for no particular reason at all. Examples of this are littered throughout the book. Henry's mother died when he was only a young boy -- this apparently had such a traumatic effect upon him that he is constantly involuntarily sent back to the moment of her death to witness it again -- Henry even goes so far as to say that it's almost as if all his time traveling REVOLVES around this one event. Okay, fine. I can accept that -- there's a lot of potential in an idea like that. But where does the author take this? Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. We are left with the knowledge that Harry sometimes relives his mother's death, that it bothers him especially on Christmas Eve, but otherwise it has no bearing upon the plot, and even more frighteningly, upon Henry himself. The fact of his mother's death is treated like trivia knowledge rather than emotional trauma. Another example is Gomez's apparent harbored affections for Clare. Not only does this information come ridiculously out of left field, but it is never developed. It's alluded to perhaps twice, and then Gomez comes on to Clare ONCE and then that's it, the story moves along as if it never happened, and it has no bearing upon anything. This shallowness unfortunately mars the entire story, because it does not stop at the inclusion of shallowly developed subplots, but it goes into and ruins nearly every sphere of the book. Shallowly developed subplots is a problem, but shallowly developed characters is a much bigger one. The only characters who have any development at all are Henry and Clare, and neither of them have very much depth either. Clare is patient, kind, sexy, beautiful, loyal, artistic, rich, good in bed, etc. etc. As for the secondary characters, they were so flagrantly underdeveloped that I found myself mixing up names quite frequently, because there was nothing in the characters to make me care, nor to help me differentiate. Gomez was known to me as "that guy who smokes cigarettes." Ingrid was known as "the suicidal." Charisse was "the girl who dates the guy who smokes cigarettes." It's not that I'm a lazy reader -- it's that Audrey Niffenegger is a lazy writer -- she uses things like cigarette smoking to define a character, but then that's it, that's as far as the depth goes. Every character has the exact same vocabulary, the exact same voice -- I often felt the dialogues were the author writing out conversations with herself as she tried to sound witty. "Tell me Clare, why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?" "Because he's really, really good in bed." That's supposed to be a joke, and that's fine, but so much of the dialogue is written this way: trite, witty, one-liners, and they never say anything about the character involved, because every character speaks in the exact same way (unless you count Nell and Kimy, both of whom I considered to be just racial stereotypes). I hate to take this further but then even the romance itself, the most important thing in the whole book, was yes, shallow. The quote mentioned above was supposed to be a joke, but the more the book went along, the more I began to suspect that the line was meant to be taken seriously. Clare first meets Henry when she is but a little girl, and throughout the course of her childhood and adolesence she sporadically meets this older Henry and falls in love with him. By the time they are married, it is surely meant to be. Now, I did not find this idea to be creepy as some did, I thought it had a lot of potential, but the writer never shows us WHY she would fall in love with a naked forty-year-old man -- it's almost as if Clare simply falls in love with Henry because he happens to show up every now and again, and it doesn't make any sense. Henry, before he meets Clare is a hard-edged, drug-using, womanizing punk, but then the moment he meets Clare in Chicago and she basically tells him "we're meant to be," he magically reforms himself, throws away his old life and habits, accepts what she tells him, falls in love overnight, but the reader is effectively shortchanged, almost as if the reader's meant to accept the romance on the grounds that it was meant to be, and that's that. Had the writer made the same effort to develop the romance as she did to put in countless unnecessarily graphic (and poorly written) sex scenes, then perhaps I'd feel differently. Because of this shallowness, not only are the characters bland, not only is the romance unconvincing, but even the story itself runs itself around in circles over and over and over and over again. By the time the reader learns about the eventual fate of the characters, there is nothing left to do except wait for the author to get there already, and let me tell you, she takes her time. I have nothing against long books, romance books, or time traveling sci-fi books. But I do have something against books that are sloppy, poorly edited, contrived, and worst of all, shallow. I wanted to like this book, and I had high hopes. To my disappointment, I left this book utterly unfulfilled.