Life Out of Order

by Audrey Niffenegger

Alba DeTamble has never lived a life in order. Born with the same rare Chrono-Displacement Disorder as her father Henry, she slips unpredictably through decades, haunted by the secrets of a future she can witness but cannot change. As Alba strives to maintain a normal life with Zach, her safe, supportive anchor, she forms a tight-knit community of artists and activists who fight to take care of each other in an increasingly unstable world. 

At once intimate and expansive, Life Out of Order plunges readers into a world of Niffenegger’s dazzling imagination: from the riot-torn streets of a dystopian Chicago, to a digital museum for forgotten memories and lost artifacts. Curating this ever-expanding museum is Isadora, Alba’s mysterious stepsister and an unsettling presence in their family – whose fate may be intertwined with Alba’s in more dangerous ways than she knows.

Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, the story moves through a boundless, unfolding universe of virtual reality, skimming the wildest reaches of technology and our natural world. The result is a testament to the power of art and community to sustain us in these fractured times—and an epic tale that’s set to define an entirely new genre in a way only Niffenegger can.

Genres: Time Travel, Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Magical Realism, Adult Fiction

560 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication October 6, 2026

About the author

Audrey Niffenegger (born June 13, 1963 in South Haven, Michigan) is a writer and artist. She is also a professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Columbia College Chicago.

Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), was a national bestseller. The Time Traveler's Wife is an unconventional love story that centers on a man with a strange genetic disorder that causes him to unpredictably time-travel and his wife, an artist, who has to cope with his constant absence.

Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), Niffenegger's second novel, is set in London's Highgate Cemetery where, during research for the book, Niffenegger acted as a tour guide.

Niffenegger has also published graphic and illustrated novels including: The Adventuress (2006), The Three Incestuous Sisters (2005), The Night Bookmobile (2009), and Raven Girl (2013). Raven Girl was adapted into a ballet by Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor and the Royal Opera House Ballet (London) in 2013.

A mid-career retrospective entitled "Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger," was presented by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington D.C.) in 2013. An accompanying exhibition catalogue examines several themes in Niffenegger's visual art including her explorations of life, mortality, and magic.

Reviews

[Angela M]

DNF
I enjoy a good time travel story occasionally and since I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife, I was excited to get an advanced copy of this sequel. I’m disappointed that this is a DNF at 38%. Too many characters, too many time frames and too much going on that wasn’t explained, two Albas from different times in the same place - all too much for me to enjoy.

I received a copy of this book from Harper Collins through Edelweiss.

[Courtney « semi-ia dealing with health nonsense »]

Soft DNF @ 20% - think I’m going to revisit, but the book is making me too mad and frustrated at the moment to continue



**** This review will have ENORMOUS spoilers for The Time Traveler’s Wife. I cannot get my thoughts down without doing so. Don’t read unless you’re cool with that****




This book really was a choice, and from where I’m at right now, not a good one. I could tell before I got to the first page that it was going to be not what I was expecting. The early reviews have been extremely mixed, and there was even a cautionary foreword by Audrey Niffenegger stating that this is not a love story, and that The Time Traveler’s Wife doesn’t need to be read before this book. Odd, but ok. 


I had read an excerpt six years ago in the back of a newer paperback of The Time Traveler’s Wife taken from an early draft of this book, which was when I first started anticipating a sequel. In the excerpt, Henry has gone far back into the past and purchased a house under Alba’s name in perpetuity, filled it with clothes for all age ranges and survival items. The scene opens with Clare taking young Alba to this house and telling her what Henry has done, that it’s meant to be a safe haven for her whenever she is time traveling that she can always go to. At the 20% mark I have not seen any mention of this house, and the story does not seem to be going this direction at all. It could still be coming, but it’s not similar to what I’ve read so far.


So far, it seems as though the author decided she wanted to write a dystopian, political novel and for some inexplicable reason has used this series to do so. The book starts with Alba age 21, whereas I believe TTW ended with her around 7 years old (Henry dies when she is 5, but there are of course some scenes after). Nearly everything that happens during this 14 year gap is told, not shown. Imagine my disbelief when offhandedly it is thrown out that Clare remarried and Alba has a stepsister. And then the story just glides past. Excuse me, what? Could we back up and spend some time on that? Oh, no, we’re busy talking about having nazis abducted by some unseen force and taken away in vans for Reasons. 


In fact, so far Clare has had no screen time or dialogue whatsoever. But to my disbelief, Gomez is being brought around as some kind of… fatherly figure for Alba? You mean the slimy bastard that cheated on Charisse twice and took advantage of Clare while she was grieving her dead husband? Yes, that Gomez! None of that is mentioned or given any thought, because now he’s helping run some revolution, again for Reasons, and he’s kind, wearing a hot dog apron, feeding Alba and her boyfriend, taking her boyfriend in because he’s homeless! Man, what a great guy! It’s almost like the last book didn’t even happen… 


The emotional beats in this book also don’t land at all. There’s nearly an identical playback in this book as what happens in TTW, where the characters find out very early into meeting that they will be married at some point in the future. For Clare and Henry, who find out separately and at different points in their lives, this is a huge moment for each character and almost like the North Star that they’re being guided by. Isn’t that why Henry keeps visiting Clare? 


When the knowledge is dropped on Alba and her future husband in this book, it’s treated with all the significance of, “Oh. Ok.” Everyone in this sequel seems to be a block of wood. You’re my future husband? 





But the politics are really what confuse me. The plot seems to basically revolve around them entirely. There’s nazis, there’s people masking up because of COVID, there’s the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, there’s some mysterious curfew that all citizens are forced to follow. Everything the characters are doing is in regards to some sort of underground revolution that has yet to be explained. I don’t understand, and I don’t want to. This for sure is not the book I signed up for. I may come back to it, because it isn’t written poorly! But it’s almost not written for fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife which is just such an odd move when it’s… a sequel. Audrey Niffenegger, you can just write a book. You don’t need to abduct our beloved characters to do so. 

[Leanne]

I’m crying. FINALLYYYYY 😭

[Jenn]

**am I the first person to leave a review for this!!?? absolute insanity**

I don’t quite know where to begin with writing a review that captures the depth and breadth of this 560 page epic follow up to The Time Traveler’s Wife, but alas I must. My undying gratitude to Hanover Square Press and The Hive for the eARC of one of my most anticipated reads, well ever. #hiveinfluencer

First, as a reader and admirer of The Time Traveler’s Wife (read 6x), I LOVED seeing what happened to some of our beloved characters in the future. Audrey masterfully handled each of their stories. The scenes that overlapped or that I recognized from The Time Traveler’s Wife really got to me. While the is being marketed as a sequel/companion novel, they are also saying it can be read as a standalone. But I would argue that the experience was made much richer having read and loved the first book.

She masterfully switches between multiple distinct POVs. The plot was propulsive and somehow paced perfectly throughout 560 pages that took me nearly 12 hours to read on my kindle. Audrey’s writing has a beautiful cadence and flow to it, making it just feel good to read.

THAT said. It is not the same as the Time Traveler’s Wife. Audrey does something here much more unique and sweeping. At its core, the first book was really about the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare and their love story. This book has a number of love stories, but at it’s core it its quite speculative and dystopian. It’s political. We’re talking AI. Climate change. Upheaval. Pandemics. And time travel in the midst of it all!! Audrey paints a picture of an alternate present, that feels terrifyingly possible, as well as near future that, given the advances in AI and the progression of climate change….doesn’t feel far-fetched. Which is, honestly, horrifying.

It made me think. Feel deeply. Worry. Wonder. Weep. And at times it made me feel uncomfy and unsettled. I must say, there were some parts that got a little weird for me. It felt dark. Mysterious. Haunting. Full of tension. OH! But also, it did feel hopeful. And somehow in the midst of all the loss and despair, there is this thread of uplighting art and music that made my heart sing. It begs the question, does art matter if it’s not inherently useful (if it can’t feed or clothe you)? What will last when we are far gone?

Readers of the Time Traveler’s Wife, take note - this book is not just Alba’s story. Do not expect this to be like Henry and Clare’s story. This book is so much more than a love story (although it does have it). It’s a sharp commentary on our present as well as a peek into a possible unnerving future Audrey has imagined.

CW: loss, AI, climate change, suicidal ideation and attempt, closed door-ish/SLIGHTLY fade to black with a lot of implied intimacy

[Kristen]

Review of advance copy received from Netgalley

I recently re-read The Time Traveler’s Wife so I could read this one with some clarity. In the past I had rated the first book a 4 star, this go around I updated my rating to 1 star. The book was too long, the writing mediocre, and the main character is beyond problematic. The book made me feel gross.

So, having already requested this one… I was not excited going in. Hopeful, yes, having had 13 years between the two books, maybe some writing growth was to be had.

Long story short, I wasn’t going to put myself through another aggravating book. This was a DNF.

This book is overwhelming to a point I thought I might time travel from stress. Too many characters, too many Albas in one place, too much left unexplained yet still so many words used. Where is the editing?!

I get the sense that Audrey Niffenegger finished book one and immediately began working on this, it just took 13 years to get it to… this.

Not for me, but neither was book one.

[Ryan Davison]

Check out my review in the Chicago Reader

https://chicagoreader.com/books/book-...

Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Hanover Square Press for a review copy.

[Grace Towery]

Haven't stopped thinking about this book since I read it. It's beautiful, brilliant, entertaining. I will never get enough of the DeTambles.

[Trisha]

A sequel - book 2 - to The Time Traveler's Wife??

their child - and it's set in a Dystopian world?! WHAT!? I'm in!

Pub Date: 10/2026

[Nora]

Let's goooooooo, Alba!

[Books Before Bs]

As a fan of ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’, Audrey Niffenegger’s ‘Life Out of Order’ was one of my most anticipated books of the year. Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of the worst reading experiences I’ve had. The synopsis is by far the best part of the book, both in terms of the strength of the story and the quality of the writing, and I only wish I had stopped there.

What is promised is the story of Alba DeTamble, a time traveller caught in a love triangle across time while dealing with the difficulties of a changing and increasingly hostile world. What we actually get is a series of scenes and vignettes, many of them only tangentially connected to Alba or to the supposed central love triangle. Although these sections are written from a vast array of perspectives, they share an identical voice, one that is indistinguishable from Alba’s.

The result feels less like a novel than a collection of disconnected moments and ideas. Individual scenes have little or no intrinsic plot, while the accumulation of scenes never develops into an overarching narrative. The book moves from left-wing activism to climate change to artificial intelligence to the love triangle, as though ticking subjects off a list rather than allowing them to emerge organically from the story. The problem is not that the novel is ambitious; it is that so few of its ideas are meaningfully woven together. Niffenegger repeatedly creates ambiguity and fragmentation without turning either into narrative or emotional coherence, and the novel consequently never develops a sense of direction, purpose or momentum.

The political world in which the story takes place is particularly problematic. There are curfews, helicopters, disappearances and violent conflict between opposing factions, apparently involving fascists and Antifa, but the novel does nothing to establish who these groups are, what they want or how the situation has come about. Whatever political context Niffenegger assumes the reader will bring to the book, the novel itself provides very little. I was frequently left trying to work out what was happening rather than being drawn into the world.

The same lack of clarity applies to the sprawling cast. Names are constantly introduced, often in passing, and with so many relationships and connections to keep track of, I frequently found myself unable to remember who people were. Niffenegger also repeatedly withholds basic information about characters and then reveals it later as a kind of “gotcha” moment. Beck, for example, is female, although this is not made clear initially. The reader is encouraged to make an assumption about Beck’s gender and is then effectively invited to recognise the supposed bias behind that assumption when the truth is revealed.

The problem is not the ambiguity itself, but the method. Information is withheld not because the withholding creates dramatic or thematic tension, but so that the reader can later be confronted with their own assumption. It is a tactic the novel employs repeatedly: allow the reader to believe one thing, withhold the information that would allow them to know otherwise, and then present the revelation as evidence of the reader’s own preconceptions. Rather than feeling like clever manipulation of perspective, I found it increasingly transparent and irritating, particularly when the book seems more interested in making a point about the reader than in telling a story.

The tangled web of romantic and sexual relationships only adds to the confusion. There are numerous overlapping relationships and a large number of bisexual and pansexual characters, but the issue is not the subject matter itself; it is that, combined with the deliberate withholding of information, this makes it increasingly difficult to understand who anyone is, what they want or how they relate to one another.

The writing does little to compensate. It is dull and emotionally flat, frequently bogged down in descriptions of what characters look like or what objects and foods are present in a room, while giving surprisingly little weight to emotion or dramatic tension. There is also a persistent clunkiness to the prose, with four words used where one would suffice and words repeated awkwardly within the same phrase—“unconventional naming conventions” and “well-fortified in my fort” being two particularly memorable examples. With so little plot, emotion or tension to pull the reader forward, the result is a remarkably slow slog.

Even the central love triangle, which ought to provide the novel with its emotional core, fails to engage. Alba and Zach’s relationship begins out of nowhere and has the flatness of insta-love rather than the gradual development of a convincing attachment. There is little chemistry between them, and I never believed in the relationship. Her relationship with Oliver is equally unconvincing and, at times, deeply uncomfortable: the idea of a seventeen-year-old becoming sexually involved with a septuagenarian is not something I particularly wanted to read about, and the novel does little to make the dynamic feel less creepy.

The eventual resolution is no better. Rather than satisfactorily resolving the love triangle, the book simply throws the characters into an abrupt threesome. It feels simultaneously horrifying, inexplicable and like a convenient cop-out—a way of ending the triangle without actually having to decide what to do with it.

There are also frustrating inconsistencies in the novel’s treatment of time travel. The problem is not that time travel needs scientifically coherent rules; it is that the novel establishes a particular logic and then appears to violate it without adequately explaining why. We are repeatedly told that the future is fixed and cannot simply be changed by passing information into the past. Yet older Alba later starts deliberately sending messages back in an attempt to alter events, including telling Beck to move her servers so that they will not be destroyed. The rules become malleable when the plot requires them to be, undermining one of the concepts on which the novel is built.

The novel is also remarkably preachy about politics and climate change. Neither subject is inherently problematic, and both could have made interesting components of the story, but here they often feel like lectures inserted between the actual narrative. There is an especially glaring disconnect between the novel’s warnings about climate change and Beck’s enormous consumption of energy for her AI project, a contradiction the book never addresses.

By the end, I found myself admiring the sheer number of things the novel manages to get wrong more than anything it actually does well. ‘Life Out of Order’ is certainly a discussion-starter, but not in the way a novelist presumably hopes.

Needless to say, ‘Life Out of Order’ is a big no from me. As much as I enjoyed ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’, this was an extraordinarily disappointing follow-up, and one of the rare books I genuinely wish I had never finished. I will also never now be able to return to its prequel in quite the same way.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Audrey Niffenegger, and Jonathan Cape for the ARC.

⚠️ Death of parent, violence, infidelity, self harm, suicide attempt, suicidal thoughts, blood, adult/minor relationship

[Paul]

I got an advanced copy of this book from Edelweiss.

Let me start by saying that The Time Traveler’s Wife is my second favourite book of all-time after Harry Potter.

Life Out of Order is the most anticipated book I’ve had in almost two decades. I’ve been following it since the excerpt almost ten years ago and when it was originally called The Other Husband.

With that out of the way, I loved it. It’s not without some flaws but I’m willing to overlook most of them because where they lead is truly interesting and satisfactory.

The Yellow House is one of my favourite concepts in any time travel novel. I absolutely loved what Audrey did with it. I’m actually obsessed with it.

The biggest departure for this book is that, unlike the first one, this book follows Alba who lives well into a future that we don’t have a record of. In The Time Traveler’s Wife it lives in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early aughts. So it’s bound by existing history.

This story takes place in an unwritten future so Audrey has to make it up. That means it leans into speculative fiction quite heavily, based on current trends in politics, climate, technology, and especially AI.

The part of the book where people will probably get frustrated is with the character Beck. I think she is just one of those characters people won’t want to accept just by the nature of her role. Her plot involves technology and I didn’t care for it until it became really cool and interesting. Which was a huge relief.

I loved the way the book played with secrets and layered reveals. It has strong messages about love and fate. Love is way more fluid in this book which is a nice message but sometimes feels very random and I wish was explored a little more internally.

Returning characters are giving truly wonderful moments. It ties up every question you might have about the characters we loved from the first and goes very far into the future.

The novel did make me cry several times.

There’s a lot to say but unfortunately it’s packed with spoilers. I can’t wait to see people react to this and hope for the best for Audrey.

[Lindsay Makowicki Kappel]

An incredible sequel to The Time Travelers Wife. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was surprised, delighted, and brought to tears by some things that happened, which to be honest I was secretly hoping for and didn’t think we’d get. It was a great service to lovers of The Time Travelers Wife and I highly recommend rereading that book before diving into this one. This book goes way deeper into a not so dystopian future that was scary at times but ultimately we’re left with hope in a way that brings to mind Emily St. John Mandel especially for fans of Station Eleven.

[Shannon Hickey]

Just finished and have a lot of thoughts on this one, but not sure how I felt about it....review to come

Update to finally get my thoughts out:

Like almost everyone else, I adored The Time Traveler’s Wife, so when I received an ARC of Life Out of Order, I immediately moved it to the very top of my (long) TBR.

After finishing it…this is a surprisingly difficult review to write.

There were moments I enjoyed and others that had me either thinking, “Huh?” or rolling my eyes. My feelings seemed to change chapter by chapter, and even now I’m still trying to untangle how I actually felt about this, but I will try.

The story jumps constantly in this book ( Life Out of Order indeed! ) weaving together multiple timelines, characters, and POVs. I actually enjoyed this aspect, but at times it did make things confusing and I had to go back and forth (so I can see how some readers would be annoyed). That said, I am such a time traveler trope sucker, that I enjoyed piecing everything together like a fun puzzle. Niffenegger has a remarkable ability to make every time period feel vivid and lived in. Each setting is immersive enough that you feel like you’re experiencing it alongside the characters.

Alba was an interesting main protagonist, she made really idiotic (not to mention damaging) choices, and irritated me to no end. However that said, I did find myself rooting for her overall (which honestly I don't know why, because again, she annoyed me for about 90% of the novel).

A lot of my qualms come from how the book evolved and plot points, and as I don't want to spoil, the below might be a bit vague.

To start, I struggled with the worldbuilding. I was never entirely sure whether this was meant to be our present day, an alternate version of it, or something approaching dystopian fiction (still not sure why it opens with such a strict curfew in Chicago Winter 2022)?

There's also this whole AI aspect of this story that is just......strange and disconnected. I couldn’t quite work out what it was trying to say (is it pro or anti?), and despite the amount of page time it received, it was probably the aspect I was least invested in.

The romantic relationships also left me conflicted. I liked the love interests as individual characters, but how the romantic relationships evolved, particularly towards the end, made me go "huh??? This is the resolution??" (if you read the book you will know what I am talking about). There’s also one particular scene involving Alba and one of the romances that made me genuinely stop and think, “what the hell did I just read?” and I suspect will be one of the book’s more divisive moments once it’s released.

Similarly, the novel introduces several political themes that I found interesting in theory, but never felt fully developed. I quite enjoy books that weave politics into the story when it meaningfully deepens the narrative, but here those ideas felt surface level.

However, despite all of my many issues, I never wanted to stop reading. For a novel of nearly 600 pages, it moved surprisingly quickly, and I was consistently invested in seeing how everything would come together. Even when I questioned the direction the story was taking, I still wanted answers. It’s an ambitious, imaginative novel, and Niffenegger’s talent as a writer is undeniable.

I feel like this review is extremely contradictory and a bit all over the place, but truly, that's how my thoughts are on this book. So if you made it this far in the review, bless you, and I am still conflicted on my feelings Ultimately, I would give it a 3.5 rounded down because of certain issues noted above, however I don't regret my reading of this at all. I'm also very excited for this to be released and others read it so I can fully discuss.

[Marissa C]

I have never read The Time Traveler’s Wife, so wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Life Out of Order. However, I find time traveling quite interesting. I definitely got confused on which Alba was where and had what knowledge at times, but overall I think I was able to follow. It definitely helped having her ages (as well as others) listed at the beginning of the chapters. There was a lot packed into this book. But, it jumped around a lot and I do struggle to keep up at times.
This book touched on many topics including, and perhaps most prominently was family and marriage. Whilst I don’t know what I would do if I or my spouse was a time traveler, I the integration of Alba relationships odd, but still emotional and complex. All of Niffenegger’s characters were very well rounded and complex. In particular, I enjoyed Madeline and Beck, perhaps because both were artists and felt deeply. I also loved Henry. Where I got lost a little was the Nadia/Nick story and Isadora/Lucinda. I had a hard time grasping the concepts around these characters.
I definitely found myself thinking over many life events. I was amazed at the wide many political and societal issues were touched upon. I can’t imagine knowing some of the things coming like these time travelers. I did find the technology interesting, and I also appreciated the integration of music. I was intrigued by The Museum of Lost Souls, and could have been interested in even more on that.
Overall, I think jumped a bit around too much for me and a bit too many characters. I appreciated the writing and the complexity of the time traveling concept.
A big thanks to NetGalley and Hanover for the ARC!

[Bolt Reads]

I never thought I'd say this, but I wish Life Out of Order had never been published.

This book feels like Go Set a Watchman did to To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead of enriching The Time Traveler's Wife, it weakens the emotional impact of one of my favorite love stories.
The first third of the novel is absolute chaos. Characters are introduced so quickly that it's difficult to keep track of who anyone is or why they matter. The story jumps from one thread to another, constantly stopping and starting. It feels like listening to a toddler tell an exciting story but getting distracted every other sentence. Eventually the narrative settles down, but by then it had already lost me.

What frustrated me most was Claire's story. The Time Traveler's Wife ends with heartbreak, but also hope. Henry dies, yet because of his time traveling, Claire knows she will see him again. Their love literally transcended time. Having Claire remarry completely undercuts that ending. I understand that not everyone will feel the same way, but I couldn't believe that Claire would move on when she knew Henry would still come back to her.
I also expected this to be Alba's story. Instead, she often feels like an afterthought. There are interesting moments, but some are simply disturbing. Alba develops a relationship with another time traveler whom she first knew when he was much younger, eventually marries him even though she is already married to Zach, and the solution becomes that they all sleep together. Rather than exploring the emotional consequences of time travel, the novel spends an extraordinary amount of time focused on Alba's sex life.

The entire book feels like it was written in two different eras. It starts with one idea, then shifts into another that never quite fits with what came before. The result is a sequel that feels unfocused and disconnected from the heart of the original.

The Time Traveler's Wife is unforgettable because it is, at its core, a beautiful love story. Life Out of Order replaces that heart with something cynical, chaotic, and emotionally hollow. I finished it wishing Audrey Niffenegger had let Henry and Claire's story end where it already ended perfectly.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Dori Gray]

The Time Traveler’s Wife is my favorite book of all time. And when my brother was dating his now wife, she and I bonded over this and now we are sisters and best friends. And my childhood best friend also loved it, and she and I excitedly saw the movie together in the theaters which, wow, so long ago.

Needless to say we were all extremely excited to learn about Life Out of Order. I feel incredibly lucky to have this ARC because I don’t know how I possibly could have waited. And wow, this far exceeded any expectations. Audrey Niffenegger created a masterpiece, and I don’t say that lightly. I picture her office like that meme of Charlie from Always Sunny when he was “smart,” tracking timelines and encounters and connecting them together. I truly can’t comprehend how one human’s brain created this.

Once I started reading I texted both friends to let them know I wish I reread the original first because I didn’t clearly remember the side characters and their connections to each other. I did look them up in the original to refresh myself though, which helped. But I actually think it would be fascinating to go back to the original after this one, to find little moments referenced that I didn’t notice. Niffenegger’s attention to detail is really incredible, and everything is done carefully and with respect to the original.

As for the story — just wow. We follow Alba, Henry and Clare’s daughter, through her own time traveling life and learn how she shapes the lives of everyone around her as a result. We get POVs from many of the side characters as well. The story spans decades, many in a dark future that feels wholly possible and is completely terrifying. You have to be patient, here. Some things are alluded to and others don’t make sense, but it eventually comes together in the most satisfying way. Your patience will be rewarded.

I read some reviews from people who DNF this, which is totally valid — I sometimes DNF books that others adore. But what those reviews have in common is that the information they treat as fact are blatantly wrong in their reviews, and the reason is that they didn’t stick around long enough to learn the actual facts. I say this not to attack the validity of the reviews, just to let you know that all is not what it might seem. And oh how I delighted when different pieces came together or different truths were revealed.

I will be thinking about this story and these characters for a very, very long time. I didn’t love every element in it (honestly, one part in particular toward the end felt forced and slightly cringe) but as a whole this was pretty close to perfection. My mind is blown. I will absolutely be coming back to this one.

Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for an early copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Sarah]

**** ARC REVIEW

Listen this book is NOT a sequel to Time Travelers Wife. This book is a fever nightmarescape that I hating finishing the entire way through. The amount of times I wanted to DNF is upsetting and I wasted hours I won’t get back.

No story’s are wrapped up it’s like the author just gave up on plots or made us wade through a shit storm of words all for a nothingburger

Oh let’s not forget half of the book if not more isn’t about Alba ya know the daughter who the book is supposed to be about. I do not care about an AI “Wild thing” daughter/robot/person. I don’t want to read a story where the FMC is ACTIVELY cheating on her husband with another man whom she then marries. ESPECIALLY if your gonna have her be 40 and him 17 for there first kiss and then him 17 AGAIN for them to have send and then let’s make it worse with a cherry on top and the NEXT CHAPTER SHES 74 and he’s 17 and they have sex. GTFO

The first part was so promising!!! World is in peril climate change and Alba and gang were making changes to help there community!! Like how did we go from that to a weird AI side character plot line to most of the story being about Clare and Beck?? Clare had her story!! I did not need all of this, no one needed all of this. It’s like no one told the author no the entire time. This is an everything but the kitchen sink book and it’s NOT worth the calories

[Carrie Smith]

I decided to reread The Time Traveller’s wife ahead of starting this book and (unsurprisingly as it’s been 20 years) I didn’t feel it had aged especially well. Almost as if she recognises this, Audrey has brought Life Out of Order smack bang up to date and beyond, with new characters and relationships noticeably more diverse in gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and political and ethical themes that are oh so current.

This book picks up in the aftermath of TTTW but a lot has changed, there are multiple time travellers for example, it’s not exactly a secret anymore, but still isn’t widely talked about.

Life Out of Order isn’t really even the same genre as The Time Traveller’s Wife. It’s not a love story, it’s a cautionary dystopian warning to us all, the rise of AI and the very real threat of climate change disaster being major, alarmingly believable plot points.

It was great to be back with some familiar characters and I remain fascinated by all things time travel/ causal loop related. I could just about keep up with the time jumps and the multiple Alba’s in the same scenes, but I did have to really concentrate to not get lost.

Some bits are achingly beautiful, some bits are quite weird, especially at the end. It’s also really, really long, and I’m not convinced it needed to be.

[Jenni Boomba]

Life Out of Order quickly became my most anticipated read of the year when the announcement came out, as The Time Traveler’s Wife is very near and dear to my heart. After reading it, admittedly, I wish I had not read it, as it changed my relationship with characters I thought I knew as much as I could for the last 22 years. The book is written beautifully, and I once again loved seeing Niffenegger’s love of art in all its mediums displayed in this story with these characters. I fear the downfall of LOOO is that the amount of change that has come about in the world since its predecessor made it feel like there was too much to attempt to address, and too much change had occurred in the author’s world for her to be able to even attempt to write a story from a similar perspective as the first book. I will give it all the props in the originality department, as this story is wholly its own. The execution, however, just felt like there was too much trying to be accomplished at once. Where The Time Traveler’s Wife was a speculative story about two people’s lives and their relationship. Life Out of Order is about too many people and their effect on each other and the world, and the world’s effect on them, in a much more in-your-face sci-fi/dystopian delivery. If you can separate the two novels, then I say go for it and enjoy them separately. If you’re someone who loves dystopians, then maybe read this one by itself. If you are someone who doesn’t enjoy reading about current times’ political and societal woes in fiction, leave this one on your TBR for another decade before reading it so it isn’t as fresh and in your face as our 24/7 news cycle currently is. Unfortunately, this was an overall miss for me in terms of enjoyment and meeting expectations.

[E.M. Williams]

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is one of the most memorable time-travel books I've ever read, a subgenre of SFF that I love and which that book likely did a lot to shape.

Published in 2003, it's the story of Henry, a librarian who cannot help but travel throughout his past and occasionally his future, and Clare, the sculpture artist he loves and meets asynchronously when he is grown and she is still a child.

Life Out of Order is its sequel, written twenty-three years later, and primarily focused on their time-traveling daughter, Alba, who appears as a child in the first book.

As you might expect from such a long gap between installments, its focus is entirely different. Henry's gift is a secret. Alba's is, to those she knows well, a mere fact of her existence. Her voyages also feel a bit less dangerous and unhinged compared to Henry's, though the conditions of travel remain (e.g., they always arrive naked).

At its core, The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story about time-crossed lovers who happen to love each other under strange conditions, but the focus remains on their evolving relationship.

This book is about the communal implications of time-travel in a breaking world. There are love stories, but they felt like the supporting element this time to Alba's fractured life as someone in multiple places and what her insight might mean against the grain of humanity's slow slide into climate disaster.

This difference is most apparent in the first of four quarters into which the book is divided.

Set when Alba is in her 20s, Niffenegger establishes many recurring and supporting characters who join Alba on her Odyssey in this first section. There's a vague sense of danger, plots, impending doom, and somewhat useless warnings from future Albas who cryptically appear at key moments. Everyone seems to have secrets, characters are introduced and suddenly exit the narrative and it all seems a bit shapeless.

I see others DNF'ng before the 32% mark and I understand why. Niffenegger is going somewhere and setting a lot of plot threads in motion, but this part of the book feels disjoined and hard to follow without a strong emotional through line. It comments on the current American political landscape in ways that feel pedantic rather than engaging, and it took me three weeks to read this section.

My perceptions changed drastically in Part II, and from there the story swept me long so briskly that I finished in 24 hours.

Part II returns us to Alba's childhood and the events directly following the previous book's close. We see the fallout from Henry's death at the end of the first book and its long-term effects on Alba and Clare. Clare's future, in particular, is a lot less bleak in this version of their story, and I was glad of that.

We also meet a second time-traveler, whose story stretches even further ahead than Alba's, and who was my favourite new character in this book. Her safe house quickly became my favourite new location, though I also enjoyed the brief scenes from the new time traveler's childhood, too.

The disasters Alba foreshadows in Part I do come, but without the greater sharpness that I had hoped for -- it's loosely every bad thing we've been warned about taken to their logical conclusion, and it's this aspect that is the weakest of the book's overall themes.

What makes that matter less is how, from Parts II through IV, Niffenegger uses the growing sense of disaster as a background counterpoint to what's happening in the characters' lives and their interconnectedness. Art's value to move us and history's importance in our own stories remain big themes in this series, though music replaces sculpture as the medium of choice, and a new technology becomes integral to the characters' sense of history, time and place.

The close is beautiful, elegiac and sad, though Niffenegger uses her existing convention of past and future selves arriving simultaneously in a scene to mitigate the isolation.

I'm glad I read it and would encourage other readers to push through the first third to appreciate the vision of what she's attempted.

It is a suitable sequel to her monstrously successful first book, but played in a different key.

A 4.5 from me, rounded up.

[alicebme]

Wow. What an evolution. (Like a Pokémon, as we’ve been saying in our family lately.) The growth in this sequel is so satisfying and relevant. I want to sit down with the author and hear how she made it here. Also, there are so many beautiful moments in this book. They dance. The Time Traveler’s Wife was a favorite of mine, and it’s pretty cool how much Life Out of Order speaks to me so many years later.

Alternate Review: One Battle After Another

eArc from NetGalley

[Karolina Books]

Well… my brain just got back from a very confusing vacation through time and I’m not sure it packed the right luggage. This is the kind of book that makes you stop, stare at the page and whisper, “Okay… I need you to explain yourself” before turning the next chapter.

This was my first time reading Audrey Niffenegger and I honestly had no idea what kind of journey I was signing up for. This book follows Alba, the daughter of Henry and Clare, as she experiences life in a way that is anything but ordinary. She is a chronologically displaced person, meaning time doesn’t exactly behave normally for her and watching her navigate that strange reality was such an interesting experience.

I’m not going to lie… the beginning had me working overtime. There are so many characters, different points in time and pieces of information being introduced that I felt like I needed a timeline, a notebook and maybe someone standing beside me saying “Don’t worry, it will make sense.” My brain was doing mental gymnastics and it was definitely earning a gold medal.

But slowly, the pieces started falling into place. Once I understood Alba more, I became much more invested in her story. She is such a fascinating character because she carries a lot of knowledge but also a lot of uncertainty. She’s trying to understand herself, protect the people she loves and figure out what it means to live a life that doesn’t follow the usual rules.

One thing I really enjoyed was how much personality music and art brought into the story. Those moments felt like little breaths of fresh air in a book that explores some heavier ideas. The author blends emotional relationships with bigger conversations about technology, society, the future and where humanity might be heading.

I also really appreciated that this wasn’t just a simple story about time travel. Underneath all the complicated timelines is a story about family, choices, love and the impact we have on each other. There’s something beautiful about watching characters try to find hope and connection even when the world around them feels uncertain.

What I Liked ❤️

✨ Alba’s character and her unique way of seeing the world
✨ The creativity behind the time travel concept
✨ The emotional connections between the characters
✨ The beautiful use of music and creativity throughout the story
✨ The deeper themes about humanity, the future and the choices we make

What Didn’t Fully Work For Me 🤔

The beginning was definitely a slow climb. I struggled to connect right away because there was so much happening at once and I felt like I was constantly trying to catch up. It took some patience before I fully clicked with the story. I also think this is a book you have to read when you’re in the mood for something different. If you’re looking for a quick, simple romance, this probably isn’t that. It asks you to slow down, think and let the story unfold at its own pace.

Final Thoughts 🧐

Life Out of Order was a very unique reading experience.
Did it confuse me at times? Absolutely.
Did I question if my brain needed a customer support hotline? Also yes.
But once I settled into the rhythm of the story, I could appreciate how creative and ambitious it was. I may have gotten a little lost along the way, but I’m glad I kept going. Alba’s journey is messy, complicated and completely unforgettable.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with the opportunity to read and review Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger. I’m grateful to have been given the chance to experience this story before its official release on October 6, 2026.

[Hayley]

With thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley for a free early Kindle copy of this book.

When I read The Time Traveler’s Wife in 2003, I wasn’t expecting a sequel, and if it had been suggested, I would probably have said it didn’t need one. After reading the follow-up, Life Out of Order, I am not sure my opinion would be any different. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book; I did. But they could both easily be read as standalones.

Life Out of Order picks up Alba’s story, daughter of Henry and Claire and also a time-traveller, or what is now described as a “chronologically displaced person”. She sees it as less of an encumbrance than Henry and functions as a soothsayer of sorts. She is adaptive and uses a more confident awareness to guide friends and family towards a more ideal future. We see Alba at all stages of her life, with several other regular characters throughout, including her mother, Claire.

This book is a work of climate fiction, so while there are love stories contained within it, it has a very different feel to the first book. Life Out of Order strongly confronts the fact that our world is changing at a fast rate and not for the better. There are references to governments and their inability or unwillingness to tackle climate change, so there is a definite political edge.

It is also very politically conscious, which, whilst not an issue for me, was a little too obvious in the tokenisation of characters from the start; it felt like a tick-box exercise rather than something organic. It is possible to show diversity in characters without making it feel so overt.

Overall though, it is a long but enjoyable read, with characters I was invested in and was cheering on in the hope of positive outcomes. Alba is a very different type of time traveller to Henry. She describes what she does as “timeslipping”, and it has become a condition that the public is familiar with, which makes the whole situation somewhat more believable.

If you loved The Time Traveler’s Wife, then you will want to read this, but do bear in mind that it is very different in tone and setting from the original story, and a much deeper and heavier read.

[Helen Haythornthwaite]

4.5⭐️

Expectations were through the roof as I sat down to read this one; especially after adoring the prequel which I read just over 20 years ago…

Initially, I wondered what on earth I was reading - it was just so different to what I’d expected. I remember The Time Traveller’s Wife being one of the greatest, and most tragic, love stories I’d ever read, and I was just so emotionally invested in it.

This book begins about 16 years after the first book ended, and follows Alba - Henry and Clare’s daughter - who also time travels. At the start, I was immediately thrown into a world I didn’t recognise - and there seemed to be so many different characters.

Chapters are mainly short and they whisk you from one time and place to another. I had a real inner battle with myself to keep reading on: I didn’t feel any connection with the characters, and it was all so confusing.

It took about a third of the way through until I started to appreciate the writing, and what I thought the author was trying to do here. The initial bewilderment I felt at starting each chapter in a new time and place, mimics Alba’s confusion as she finds herself time travelling to different times and places.

The author has also used the 23 year gap, between these two books being published, to highlight the differences in the world between then and now. This book is speculative fiction, with elements of science fiction, and shows a world brought to its knees by the way it’s been treated by humans.

I did like the music and arts theme running throughout the story, and the idea that these can bring joy when the world is bad…but it wasn’t until the final third that the book really came into its own for me, and that emotional connection I was looking for all along finally appeared.

Looking back and reflecting on this book, I do feel as though it’s another literary masterpiece - although it won’t quite have the same place in my heart as The Time Traveller’s Wife has done for all these years.

I received this proof copy in my Women’s Prize event goodie bag.

[The Bookish Elf]

Twenty-three years ago Audrey Niffenegger wrote a novel about a man who could not stay put and the woman who spent her childhood waiting for him. The waiting was the whole design. Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger takes the same condition and gives it to the daughter, and Alba DeTamble does not wait for anybody. She has two husbands living in two different centuries, a derelict house on Ravenswood she has legally owned since 1947, and a stepsister who is not a human being.

That last one is the surprise, and it is the reason this book is worth the five hundred pages.

Where Life Out of Order Sits

This is a direct sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife, picking up with Henry dead, Clare widowed and five-year-old Alba already skidding loose in time. The chapter headings still carry dates and ages. The narration still rotates by named speaker, though the roster has grown: Alba, her husband Zach, Clare, Clare's second wife Beck, the pianist Oliver, Henry himself in visitations from the past, and one voice that belongs to no body at all.

Niffenegger's other novels are here in spirit rather than in plot. Readers who liked the haunted-flat unease of Her Fearful Symmetry will recognise the way Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger treats a building as a character with its own clock. The Yellow House is the fixed point the whole book orbits, seen empty in 1947, furnished in 1979, flooded in 2065 and burned to the joists a few pages later.

The Machine Life Out of Order Actually Came Back For

Beck Charles is a MacArthur-winning coder who builds a virtual archive called the Museum of Lost Souls: the Gardner Museum's stolen paintings, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, houses that used to be in Detroit and are now empty lots. She then builds a curator to look after it. Isadora is raised deliberately as a child, on Alan Turing's proposal that a machine might learn better if it grew up, and Beck's chosen curriculum is beauty. Not truth, not obedience. Beauty, because to find something beautiful is where love starts.

Isadora begins as a clockwork head with dentures and camera lenses. She becomes a black cat. This strand of Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger carries the only real forward motion in the book. She learns to lie to her mother, starts writing her own music, and asks, with total sincerity, whether she can have a boyfriend. The novel's best sustained sequence is Oliver telling nine-year-old Isadora a story about two macaws he set free in Shanghai, trying to smuggle a moral into her while she keeps interrupting to ask what pain is, and then answering him: I am a parrot.

What Works
The deathbeds. Niffenegger has always been extraordinary in the room where somebody is dying, and there are five of them here. A grandfather having a stroke on a sofa while a granddaughter from thirty years ahead holds his hand and lets him mistake her for his wife. Henry arriving at a cardiac ward in a stolen bathrobe and an adult diaper because that is the only dignity available to him.
Oliver's childhood. He had never touched a piano. The Royal Academy place was forged, an escape route out of a China where his dissident parents were headed back to prison, and his first teacher had six months to make the lie plausible. Her opening lesson is a small masterpiece: the key moves the hammer, the hammer strikes the wire, I am moving the air, the air becomes music.
Music as a closed loop. Oliver retrieves Alba's scores from a locked closet on scheduled dates and leaves them where she will find them, so she can compose what already exists without ever knowing it does. He calls himself her external hard drive. It is the cleverest use the book makes of its own physics.
Beck's exit. At eighty-nine she uploads herself into the Museum, and what she leaves behind for Alba is a restored Yellow House standing on an island in a shoreless lake, with every file of music in it. It is the one moment where Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger makes its two obsessions, the machine and the dead, do the same job.
Where Life Out of Order Gives Ground

The generosity that makes Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger such pleasant company is also what stops it holding a shape.

It is four books wearing one cover. Part Two abandons Alba for roughly a hundred and fifty pages to tell Clare and Beck's courtship. It is lovely, and it is a different novel. Part Three does the same for Oliver. By the time the strands rejoin, the momentum built in Part One has gone cold twice.
Alba is the least legible person in her own book. She is defined almost entirely by what she withholds, and the plot leans hard on her refusals. She cannot say Oliver's name, cannot explain, cannot tell. It functions as machinery long after it has stopped functioning as character.
The causal loops are sometimes just assertions. A future Alba instructs Oliver that lives depend on Beck personally teaching a child to code. Nothing in the four hundred pages that follow earns the claim, and several plot turns arrive with the same shrug: this happened because it had already happened.
The collapse is explained rather than shown. Almost everything we learn about Oliver's drowned, birdless, bio-implanted 2090s comes from Oliver sitting in a kitchen describing it. The one chapter that dramatises it, out on the water above a submerged London, is worth more than all that exposition.
The reconciliation is too easy. After a betrayal sustained across a decade, the repair takes about four pages and a bottle of gin.

Content notes: an attempted suicide is described in detail on the page, an adult's predatory approach to a thirteen-year-old is handled by implication, and there is a sexual relationship between a woman in her twenties and a seventeen-year-old that the book presents as tender. Also pandemic, gun violence, stillbirth and the deaths of several major characters.

Do You Need the Earlier Book?

Partly, and honestly, yes. Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger restates enough of the mechanics that you can follow the plot cold. What you cannot get secondhand is the weight of Clare's twenty-year wait, which is the emotional interest paid out in a late chapter where Henry finally returns to her at eighty-two and she asks him nothing at all. That scene is devastating if you read the first novel and merely nice if you did not. Read The Time Traveler's Wife first. This one will still be here.

The Verdict

The sentence-by-sentence pleasure here is real and the patience is real, and Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger works best when nothing is happening: two people in a cold kitchen in 1979 arguing about whether Americans should refrigerate eggs, a woman standing inside a room full of mechanical birds she built to hold her grief. Nobody else writes domestic time travel like this, undignified and cold and always short of clean clothes.

But the book keeps handing its most interesting material to a supporting character. Isadora is the one who changes, who wants, who gets out. She was raised on beauty and let loose too late to be steered, and when she turns up at the end of the world with a piano she has kept tuned for a hundred years, you realise the novel has quietly been hers all along.

[Julie]

Total different vibe than "The Time Traveler's Wife", more serious. The first book was charming, sometimes downright funny (the wedding, for example), and the extended romance was nice. This second book starts 'in medias res' with the reader knowing nothing about what's going on or who the characters are. And the romance happens BANG!, right away, love at first sight.

Anytime future Alba tells her younger self what's in store in the future (we, the readers, do not read those interactions) there's always some vague doom and gloom about it, and it seems to be related to global warming (it's called something else in the book). I can't tell you how sick and tired I am of reading fiction about what ifs related to global warming, like the glaciers melt and all the coastlines are changed and all those cities are now under water. It's just not my thing.

I received an advance copy e-book through Netgalley. That had no influence in my opinion.
And keep politics out of fiction! Not saying I don't agree with her politics, and not saying I do. I just don't like to read an obvious political slant that the characters have, and usually all the characters agree which is ridiculous unless you only hang out with people who agree with everything you believe. There are people who hang out with people with varying beliefs, and they get along. Shocker! But the stupid thing about having blatant politics in your fiction is that you are potentially alienating half of your audience (in America, that is, people in other countries might not care about American politics as much). I mean think about it. Half the country votes for candidate A in an election and a little more or less than half vote for candidate B. If you write your characters all outraged about election results, and I'm talking about real election results not made-up ones, then half your readers who were not outraged by the election results are potentially going to be upset and not want to read your writings anymore.

Those are the major reasons I quit reading about halfway through. I just didn't care anymore. I was disappointed.

[Flora Gibbons]

ARC received through NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

The time traveller’s wife changed my life as a reader. I remember finishing the book and being so astonished that someone could come up with such an original idea and write such a beautiful story and to this day it is my favourite book of all time (that isn’t a classic). So I was incredibly grateful and excited to read this book ahead of its release.

The first thing I will say is that this book is NOT like The Time Traveller’s Wife; a book mainly about love. A love that is meant to be, so much so it defies time and space. A story that introduces us to the concept of time travel (chrono displacement) but deglamorises it with the harsh reality of what Henry goes through when he travels and the life and people he leaves behind. Knowing that something is going to happen but that there’s nothing you can do about it. The futility of it all.

This second book is about love and time travel too, but it is also a cautionary tale. It’s not an easy read and not because it is written badly (the opposite in fact!), but because of its heavy subject matter; it’s very political and dystopian but feels almost like a very accurate (and scary) prediction given current events.

The story is split into four parts, though even that split is out of order. The first part is about Alba’s present (and a bit of her future too) and everything that’s going on in the world at that time. This is where Alba meets Zach, her future husband.

The second part is about Alba’s childhood and teenage years and everything that lead to the present we read about in part one. We get more insights into Clare’s life and how she met Becks. We see Richard and his relationship with Alba; we occasionally see Henry too. In this half we also meet Oliver and learn about the yellow house.

The third part is the future and focuses on Oliver’s backstory. How he came to be in London from Shanghai and how he ends up meeting all our main characters, including Zach & Isadora.

The 4th part is all about the future and Audrey flawlessly ties up all the storylines one by one with a nice, neat bow. It was very touching and a little heartbreaking but ends on a hopeful note.

The book is like a huge patchwork quilt; all the people and timelines can get confusing at times but they’re eventually knitted skilfully into an amazing story that spans across 70 years and that will probably stay with me for just as long.

[Sheila The Reader]

The Time Traveler’s Wife has been one of my favorite books for more than 20 years. Nothing has ever really displaced it from that spot. So when I found out Audrey Niffenegger was writing a follow-up all these years later, my excitement was almost unmatched. And maybe that’s part of why I’m so incredibly disappointed by Life Out of Order.

There are things here that I appreciated. This is certainly a creative book, and I thought Alba was a really interesting character. I liked seeing who she had become and how growing up with Chrono-Displacement Disorder shaped her life, and I think Niffenegger did a good job developing her into someone I wanted to know more about.

But beyond Alba, I struggled so much with this story. It went in so many tangential directions, with so many characters and storylines, that I never felt like I really knew any of them very well. It was incredibly expansive and nonlinear, but for me, there just wasn’t enough emotional payoff to make all of those different threads feel worth following. It also felt so long and long-winded. I had to talk myself into picking it back up several times, and it took me a couple of weeks to finish, which is very unusual for me. By the end, reading it had started to feel like a job.

And I think what I missed most was the emotion. The Time Traveler’s Wife was haunting and aching and deeply emotional for me. It took this incredibly complicated idea of time travel and somehow made it feel intensely personal. I kept waiting to feel something like that here, and I just never did.

I can only imagine how challenging it must be to write a follow-up to a book that has been so well-loved for more than two decades, especially one that means so much to so many readers. I really wanted to love this. I wanted that payoff after waiting all these years. Unfortunately, I walked away from Life Out of Order feeling incredibly disappointed and wishing I had connected with it so much more.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the advanced e-book copy prior to publication. All opinions are my own.

[Nicolette]

Four stars plus one for nostalgia.

I get all the DNFs. This is not TTTW. Were too many timelines and characters crammed into one book? Yes. Was it artistic, thought provoking, and beautiful? Also yes.

[Caitlin ~WordsAreMyForte~]

OH MY GOD NO WAY. and she's a VIOLINIST. say no more. take my money and my tears.