A(nother) Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Do you have a book case? Most people do in some form or another.

 

And I’m assuming because you are reading a blog about a book, then you do too. (Unless I’ve tricked you into coming to this website by adding in some random tags like ‘Beyonce’ or ‘Zoella’) Whether you have one book or a hundred, or twenty thousand (Jacqueline Wilson claimed this last week), you’ll have somewhere in your home that is the home for books.

 

But how many of you us ever re-read a book? I’ve got around 200 books on my bookshelf. All of them there for different reasons, they’re either signed books, or someone special gave them to me, or they remind me of a friend.

 

Or they’re just a very special book.

 

The truth is, apart from the Harry Potters last year, I don’t re-read any of them –  which kind of makes you ask… why do we keep them?

 

Maybe it’s the memories the bring back when we look at them on the shelf. Maybe it’s to show off to our friends… or maybe we know one day we’ll need them again.

 

I was recently in the mood for a book I could trust. I’d just finished Little Deaths which… I didn’t love. I found it hard going. It took me two weeks, when most books take me on average around five days.

 

In the middle, I read Tinman by Sarah Winman which I loved. So, I was left in a position where I was going to find it hard to find a book to match up to the one I’d just read and loved, but I needed to find that I knew I would enjoy more than the other one I’d just read.

 

So I turned to my book shelf for a book I could trust. And that’s where I found The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a book that I hadn’t read in over twelve years.

 

For those hat don’t know, the plot concerns Henry DeTamble who first meet his wife, Clare, when he is 29 in the library he works in. She first meets him when he travels back in time and lands in the field outside her family home.

 

Henry is a time traveler, not through choice, but through a random genetic defect. He can’t control it, nor does he know the cause. Largely, he travels back to places along his own timeline.

 

This is the story of the Doctor and River Song long before Steven Moffatt came along, and told in a much simpler way. The trick, is not to follow the time traveler, but to follow time itself.

 

Niffenegger tells us the story of Henry and Clare in a largely chronological way, often this means that the Henry we see is both older and younger than the previous and subsequent versions of Henry that we’ll see.

 

At it’s heart, this is a love story, an exploration of fate versus free will. Like all good books, it explores that one emotion that binds us all. The one that defines all of our lives. Love.

 

And it’s just so effortlessly perfect, and simple, and sad and happy, and everything all at once. There are sometimes, just one too many peripheral characters to keep up with, but this is an inevitability when you’re exploring the whole lives of two people.

 

Re-reading The Time Traveler’s Wife was like a warm hug, like seeing an old friend. It sounds cheesy, but these are clichés because they happen.

 

If you’ve never read The Time Traveler’s Wife then it would always have been at the top of my recommendation list, so go read it now.

 

If you have read it before, maybe it’s a trip back in time (geddit?) and read it again? Alternatively, give your bookcase purpose again, visit it and pick up another book that you love, one that you trust, but haven’t read in years and rediscover the reason why you decided to keep it hanging around in the first place.

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The Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate

We’re started a YA book club. Actually, we can’t stop starting them at the moment.

 

In honour of WHSmith joining forces with Zoe Sugg to start the Zoella book club aimed at Young Adults, a few of us in the office decided to start a small YA book club.

 

I was actually reading a YA novel before we decided this, so the one I’m reviewing today will be the first of several.

 

The Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate is set in your typical American high school. It centres around seven students all around the age of seventeen, not all of whom really interact with each other.

 

But when a rumour that one of the teachers is having a relationship with one of the students starts to sweep around the school, they find themselves in a series of events that will bring them all closer together.

 

The Seven Ways We Lie is a hilarious book, it made me laugh out loudly on more than one occasion. Flitting between seven different characters viewpoints, it’s pretty fast-paced, and also explores several issues.

 

However, because of the multiple characters it doesn’t take any of the issues into any great depth. It’s strength is also it’s weakness.

 

There were also characters that I felt were under developed, and for me, these characters were the most interesting. Lukas who is hiding his pansexuality from everyone else becomes friends with a character who is essentially asexual.

 

The friendship between the two of them is fascinating, but it’s not the main plot of the book, which I get, but it left me really wanting more. There’s a bigger story there that can be told and I would definitely be interested in reading it.

 

Perhaps it’s just because stories about sexuality are relevant to my interests, and other people would have been more interested in the relationship between the two sisters.

 

But that’s the beauty of this book, it really does have something for everyone. While it might be shallow at times, it’s a distracting, entertaining read, and I would definitely read more books by Redgate.

 

I’m looking forward to what else this genre has to offer.

 

The Seven Ways We Lie scores 3.9 out of 5.