"The Time Traveler's Wife" is the story of an extra-ordinary marriage in ordinary times. Well, not quite so ordinary if you consider the fact that the marriage takes place chronologically for Claire, the wife, and is more than a little irregular for Henry, her highly adaptable Chrono-Displaced husband who time travels not through a time machine, but because of a genetic mutation.

Claire is lucky enough to meet her future husband in elementary school. Luckily for Henry, who always travels buck-naked, she is a fairly open-minded little girl and doesn’t freak the f out when Henry shows up without clothing in a field behind her house. Henry himself doesn't meet Claire until he is in his 20's but by that point, she has countless memories of the man she will eventually marry. Alas, when Claire finally meets young Henry, he has no clue who she is. Claire is more than a little disappointed that the young Henry she meets bears little resemblance to the man he will eventually become.

In her words when they first meet, "He's so young, so before.....I have a sudden fear that he has forgotten who I have become...."

Without giving away too much, the novel has several points of interest. Beyond the time travel itself, is how adaptable Henry must become to survive on the streets and fields where he is flung at random. One particularly poignant scene has an older Henry teaching his childhood self  how to pick pockets, a skill the older Henry knows his younger self will need in order to survive. This may perhaps come as a surprise to you, but landing naked in the middle of nowhere doesn't necessarily feed you well.

Time Travel is in fact, so perilous at times for Henry, that it takes away some of my own excitement to conduct my own Time Traveling experiments. Not only does Henry risk his life time and time again, he is forced to re-live some of the worst moments in his life, over and over, without the possibility for changing them. My old journals are the closest I have ever come to that and at least I had the choice to burn them.

Being the wife of a Time Traveler is, also as you may expect, not particularly easy for Claire. Not only does she have to contend with waiting for Henry’s younger self to appear, she never knows when he will disappear to another time.

Despite the fact that their marriage is non-traditional, they seem to make it work.