This review is stupidly long. Sorry about that.

TL;DR - Nope. Not even a little bit.

Trigger warnings:

graphic depictions of miscarriages, amputation, drug use/abuse, suicide, violent death

Trigger warning: This review contains quite a bit of swearing, but if you have read this book or are thinking about reading it, swearing shouldn't shock or offend you anyway.

I put off reading this for a long time because I figured it wasn't going to have a happy ending and, I don't care what anyone says, I like my romances to have a happily ever after. Sorry, not sorry. So it's just been sitting on my shelf for the past couple of years.

I finally decided to pick this up when I saw the audiobook available through my library. I felt like this might be the most palatable way to consume this story because I know that quite often literary fiction novels contain flowery, even pretentious language.

I looked at a few reviews, and saw that while most people gave glowing praise, there were several that were critical of the book. This is the same with every book. You're not ever going to please everyone. BUT, where this book was different is the fact that every critical review I saw had a bunch of people who ardently came to the book's defense. They would say that the reviewer 'didn't understand the book', basically insulting the intelligence of the reader. That actually made me more curious to see what my thoughts were.

For the first half or so of this book, I felt pretty middle of the road. There were things I didn't like, but the book held my interest and I wanted to see what was going to happen to these characters. I wasn't shipping them as a couple, but I found the story itself interesting. The second half of this (too long) book is a big mess. I found myself disliking the story and the characters more and more the longer I read. Let's dive in.

Reasons this book gets one star from me:

1. The characters are the worst. The Worst. THE. WORST.
I'm trying not to write a review longer than the book, but I feel like I could go on for days about the shittiness of these characters.
Henry is a selfish, pretentious, manipulative jerk. He uses his knowledge of different times to manipulate Clare in order to get his own way whenever she might show the slightest bit of backbone. The dismissive way he treats women who aren't Clare is gross. He cheats on his girlfriend with Clare the 'first' time he meets her in his life and doesn't really care at all. He claims he was going to end the relationship and that they aren't really together but the lady has her freaking diaphragm at his house! That's not just some casual fling. He uses his affliction to justify any shitty behavior he might exhibit, and Clare just lets him off the hook, time and again.

He goes to get a vasectomy without even talking to her about it. He justifies it by saying he's protecting her. What the fuck ever. Just because he ends up traveling before he can get the operation done and just because she gives him her blessing (knowing that in the future they do have a daughter), it doesn't make up for the fact that he was just going to do that without discussing it with her first. That's gross.

There are so many more instances of him being a total douche that I could talk about, but suffice it to say that he's an ass.

Clare isn't any better. The first time they sleep together (in Henry's life, not Clare's...I know, it's confusing...yay time travel) she sees all of his girlfriend's stuff in the medicine cabinet the next day and instead of thinking, "Wow, Henry is actually kind of a douchey piece of garbage", her first thought is, "Oh well, we're supposed to be together. He's mine now." She doesn't even feel remotely sorry that she is going to invariably be a part of bringing pain to another person, justifying her and Henry's shittiness with, "but Fate, am I RIGHT?!"
Clare has zero agency, especially in the first part of the novel. She exists only to be a prop for Henry. She has no real hobbies outside of him (I know she's an artist, but that is her career, not just something she does for fun.) There's a part where Henry brings home a tv (that he can't watch because it can induce his time travel) and she says something about how she doesn't watch tv because she "can't be bothered to watch alone." Because heaven forbid she actually has a life or interests that don't include him. We're told later in the book that sometimes when he is traveling she goes out and does things on her own, but its like, one paragraph out of the 500-page book.
Then, after Henry dies, she has sex with her best friend's husband, justifying it while it's happening by pretending it's Henry. Um, what the FUCK?! This wasn't the first time those characters slept together, but she never (that we see) sees any repercussions for this. Her friend is left in the dark and the scummy husband continues to lust after his wife's best friend. It's gross.

None of the numerous side characters is particularly well-developed. Gomez, in particular, is a total piece of crap whose actions don't make a lot of sense to me. He has a thing for Clare, but decides to stay in a relationship with Cherise (sp?) anyway, even though they weren't married the first time he cheated on her with Clare. He meets and becomes friends with Henry, but I never bought their supposed friendship. It always seemed very disingenuous to me. The last scene between the two of them feels like it isn't earned at all to me, because he's tried to undermine his relationship with Clare multiple times by this point.

2. The 'romance' is not romantic.
Their entire dynamic is just toxic. He starts visiting her when she is six years old and basically grooms her. I know people will disagree and say that they were going to end up together because they WERE together in the future, so nothing he did could stop where they would end up, but he can control what he does when he jumps. He doesn't HAVE to make the choice to engage with her. But he does. He tells her things about their future when it suits him, but plays the 'you can't know about your future' card when he doesn't want her to know something. There are times when he's visiting the teenage version of her and he'll have sexual thoughts about her and it's just not okay. I don't care that he's married to an older version of her.
After they're actually together in the same time, it's not much better. They both use each other and their relationship to justify a lot of selfish behavior. Also, Henry is really manipulative to Clare. She tells him that she doesn't feel comfortable with him winning the lottery because he did it by looking up winning numbers in the future, and he proceeds to act like it's no big deal to him one way or another and he doesn't care but he thought she might want to buy a house and build a big studio. And then she calls herself an ingrate and is guilted into accepting the money. There are many other moments like that throughout the book, and it just makes for a relationship that I can't root for. I don't understand how people can consider this a romance. Perhaps if it had stuck to more of the sci-fi side of things I would've had a better time, but this is touted as an amazing romance. I guess if you consider Romeo & Juliet and Wuthering Heights romances, you might enjoy this 'romance' as well. I thought it was terrible.


3. The writing isn't anything special.
Perhaps it's because I listened to this on audiobook. Maybe it's more successful if you read the physical copy. Regardless, the writing in this book is just not that compelling. It's very simple: I do this, then I do that, then she does this, then he says that...and so on. There are a lot of lists in this book; grocery lists, lists of musicians, books, items in a room, etc. It's boring.
One big critique I saw from many of the negative reviews was about the sex scenes in the book. Many people seemed to think there were far too many of them. I actually don't have a problem with the main characters in this book having several intimate scenes. They are dating and married for the majority of those scenes, and I don't have a problem reading sex scenes in books. HOWEVER, I will say that I didn't think any of the intimate scenes were well-written. Most of them are kind of fade-to-black anyway, but the ones that are more 'descriptive' aren't described well. At all. They are awkward as hell.

The first time the couple has sex (in Clare's life) she is 18 (her 18th birthday) and he is 41. So yeah, she's technically an adult. I understand that there aren't any legal ramifications of a 41-year-old man sleeping with an 18 year old woman. But it's still squicky. And I think it's due entirely to the fact that the entire scene lacks any nuance. Henry actually thinks, "she's legally, if not emotionally, an adult' as a justification to having sex with her. He plies her with wine in order to make her less nervous and says that she takes it 'like a little girl taking her medicine.' While they are in the foreplay part of the encounter, he says something weird about imagining that her insides are hollow, that she has no kidneys, pancreas, etc. and then he thinks about how wet she is. I don't want to step on anyone's kinks, but I can't imagine someone talking to me about my internal organs and getting aroused by it...just saying. Then there is some line about how he can imagine the blood surrounding him as he penetrates her and I cringe. I was cringing when I read it and I'm cringing as I write this. That shit is not romantic. And it's not well-written.

I see a lot of people praising the writing here and I just don't see it. It's simplistic and blunt, lacking any nuance and relying on melodrama to induce an emotional response out of its reader. It's a step away from Nicholas Sparks, and I'm not convinced that it's a step up.

4. Other WTF moments and things that pissed me off (subtitle: list of several moments where I told this book to fuck off):

a. When they are having trouble conceiving, Henry suggests that they adopt. Clare's response? "That would be fake. It would be pretending." Ummm...fuck you, Clare. Selfish twit.

b. Dr. Kendrick's reaction to having a child born with Down's Syndrome seems a little strange to me as a doctor who studies genetics. He acts like it's a fate worse than death and when Henry asks him what he would've done if he'd known, the doctor says, "Well, we're Catholic, so we probably would've ended up here anyway." So...if it wasn't for his religion he would abort a baby who had Down's Syndrome just because that baby wouldn't be like other babies? Even though being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't preclude a person from living a full and happy life? Fuck that too.

c. 15-year old Henry having sexual encounters with other versions of his teenage self. What. The. Fuck. Also his 'it's not like I'm gay or anything' comment can fuck right off.

d. "I spent my entire adolescence begging Henry to fuck me." (I'm going to vomit)

e. Clare describing Henry a 'boy' when he's 28 years old as a justification for his general trashiness.

f. Henry describing a pregnant Clare says something about seeing her 'ripen like a flesh melon'. a FLESH MELON. What the fuck?

g. Henry telling an underwhelmed Clare at their first sexual encounter (hers), "I promise you, the next time we meet, you're going to pretty much rape me."

h. The nurse asking Clare what she wants to do with Henry's amputated feet. Ummm...WHAT THE EVER-LOVING HELL?! Do people have the option to keep their amputated body parts? It's such a weird moment in the book. I can't imagine having a doctor ask me what I want to do with the amputated body parts of a loved one.

i. In his goodbye letter to Clare, Henry writes that he feels, "buoyed up by time, floating effortlessly on its surface like a fat lady swimmer."
FUCK. OFF. HENRY.

j. One of Clare's pregnancies (I think it's the first, but I can't recall) she says that she's 8 weeks pregnant and that her baby is the size of a plum. That is...not right. At 8 weeks, the fetus is no bigger than a raspberry. It just seems like a detail that could've been...I don't know...looked up before writing it.

There are so many other things I could put into this review, but I just don't want to put any more thought into it. I feel like I've been able to purge most of my hatred through this review, and now I want to move on to something I'm actually going to enjoy.