The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

A time-travel novel with a difference, The Time Traveller's Wife is a heart-wrenching story of two people's love and how that love transcends the years.

Henry has a genetic disorder which causes him to unpredictably time-travel, leaving his wife to cope with his frequent absences and (as Henry has no idea where and when he will disappear to) sometimes dangerous experiences.

With lives that have been intertwined since she was a young girl, Clare feels that she knows Henry very well when he 'first' meets her at a time when she is 20 and he is 28-years-old. Chronologically this is the first time Henry has met Clare, but he soon learns that he is to visit her childhood many times in the years to come, which is how she knows him so well.

The story of Henry and Clare is one of true love. That is clear. But Henry's condition means that their relationship is not a traditional one, and while time-travel has it's perks, it also has huge downsides for the couple, causing huge rifts bewteen them at times.

This is the first book in a long time to really get in my head. I found myself thinking about the characters when I wasn't reading the book in a much deeper way than usual.  This book does tug on the heartstrings and I'm not ashamed to admit, it made me cry on a couple of occasions!

I see that this book has quite a bad rap, but I honestly didn't see a single things wrong with it. I'd stand by it if recommending it to others, which I already have done. Now to find myself a copy of the DVD!

Room - Emma Donoghue

Five-year-old Jack has spent his whole life in a single room. He and his mother are held captive in a small outbuilding with a little kitchen, a bathtub, a bed and very little else. Not wanting her son some to realise the despair they are living in she protects him from the truth. Jack is oblivious to the situation and therefore he is happy. He is healthy, clean and clever. He doesn't know that Ma was kidnapped seven years ago and that he is the the product of Ma being raped by her abductor.

When their kidnapper loses his job and is set to lose the house, Ma realises that he will rather kill them than set them free, so she comes up with a plan to escape. Given that Jack knows nothing of the world outside the room, enlisting his help on this is very risky.

Donoghue tells this story from Jack's point of view. The writing is beautiful and the naivete of this boy who has never left the room really does come through. Jack has a very innocent soul and this shines through in the writing, without having him sound like an obnoxious or precocious little boy.

Jack thinks of every object in the room, such as Rug and Melty Spoon, as a friend with characteristics and they are referred to as proper nouns. This is a wonderful writing tool. It emphasises Jack's youth and vulnerability at every turn, as well as showing his caring nature.

While the first section of the book can be a little tedious (hey, they have a day-to-day routine and live in one room, how exciting can it be!?) it is absolutely worth sticking with. The story is compelling, the writing is creative and overall I really enjoyed this book.

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Eva is very unmaternal. She never wanted children and they weren't part of her life-plan. So when she fell pregnant with Kevin a huge weight landed on her shoulders, one she has carried through her life, not helped by the fact that her son is cold and unlovable.

Kevin's story comes to a head two days before his sixteenth birthday when he murders nine people in a high school crossbow shooting. It seems he's been planning this for a long time.

Two years after the event Eva writes a series of letters to her now estranged husband, and it is these letters that form the novel.

The twist at the end, well from what I've read online it seems a lot of people saw this coming. Maybe I just read this quite naively (I'm normally quite on top of plot twists) but I didn't see this one coming at all. Not wanting to potentially reveal anything, I'll leave that one there!

When starting up with this book I did make a few false-starts. Shriver didn't really engage with me for the first 100 pages or so. It's a really slow starter. I can't tell you what made me stick with it. Maybe curiosity, or maybe it was the fact that it had been so highly recommended, I didn't want to miss anything. Either way, it paid off.

If you can slog through the first few pages, the rest of the novel is very engaging, with the last quarter of the book being fast paced and very eventful. There's no denying that the subject matter is sensitive, and at times can be very graphic, but I feel that the gruesome-ness was justified as a way of painting Kevin's character to us. It was needed to help us understand.

Heart-wrenching at times. but worth the read.