Romance is not my cup of tea. Still, when I came across The Time Traveler’s Wife, with more than 1.6 million ratings, I decided to give it a read. I had to push myself hard, draw upon on all my resolve to complete the book, lest it join the only other DNF on my shelves.

A deliberate attempt to create a tear jerker, Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel is a mushy romance, with an overdose of sex, and a poor attempt to portray temporal anomalies that every author writing about time travel must deal with. I originally rated it 3 stars, but better sense prevailed overnight to not overrate a book that was jarring in so many ways. It would be sacrilege to classify this as a science-fiction novel.