by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: April 13, 2008

"This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, were married when Claire was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rate condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or his future....."
The Times.

I suppose that I was tempted to buy this book by the statement above, as the concept of time travel within a novel seemed interesting and I wanted to see how the author dealt with it. Film and television can trick the viewer into believing such scenarios, although the written word has to be quite clever, to do so convincingly.

Audrey Niffeneger began this book after having thought up the idea in 1997. She had a concept, and the development of the book itself took her some four and a half years. It was a work that was a difficult concept to put into words, and the way in which she dealt with the different periods of time, and the dialog between the two main characters, Henry De Tamble (a librarian from Chicago) and Clare Abshire, a child of wealthy background who was brought up in Michigan, works. Each chapter states the time of its' beginning, and is narrated alternately by Clare or Henry, in a very effective manner. The story is set in the present day though which date that is, depends upon the chapter.

The strange thing is that Henry has little control over his movement from one time period to another, and I really don't want to spoil the story too much by explaining what happens as he pops from one time to another, other than to say it really is amusing and shows that the writer not only has a great style, but that she also put a great deal of effort into making her characters work. Stress would seem to be one factor that triggers the time shift for Henry, and some of the jumps from one moment within his lifetime to another are amusing and frivolous, whilst others have you wondering how the character will get out of a terrible situation. The background characters that perhaps mold the main characters maturity is interesting and believable, from the parents and family of Clare, the eccentricity of her grandmother, and the sad solitary figure of Henry's father.

This author is new to me, and as an avid reader trying to find styles of writing that I enjoy, was a refreshing change from the almost dismal array of fiction writers that don't use the written word to its' best effect. Audrey Niffeneger does, and I looked

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