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A heartbreaking work of staggering genius – and yet I don’t quite want to give it five stars. The idea of time travel has lost its novelty by now (Henry from this book reminded me of Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five who was “unstuck in time”), but making time travel to the past and future an involuntary and unpredictable affliction of one person, while the rest of his world is progressing linearly in time, is a very original and powerful idea. And that’s the reason I’m deducting one star from the rating. Niffenegger had a really great idea, but she didn’t apply it to an equally great storyline. The things that she could have done with this idea! The possibilities! Still, the story is quite fascinating and well thought of, even though at times it slows down and becomes a drag. I feel that even with the chosen story, Niffenegger could have pushed the envelope and made it more profound than just recounting a rather ordinary (ordinary if you strip off the time travel twists) story of love and marriage. The geneticist in the story mentions that he’s an amateur philosopher as well, and I was hoping that the story would get into exploring the meaning of free will and cause and effect in a universe bound only by the laws of physics. But no. The doctor/philosopher names his child exactly what Henry had seen it in the future, and he only muses in passing over the fact that he could have chosen a different name. No further discussion about free will. I always get mad whenever I sense that a writer is dumbing down his/her book for the sake of mass appeal or a movie deal. On a scientific note – Henry mentions somewhere in the book that he doesn’t want to do something that will contradict the future because he doesn’t want to split the universe. Um, the idea of time travel is patently illogical unless you believe in the parallel-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. Also, I thought attributing time travel to a gene was really lame. A chrono-displacement gene? Please!