Time to be transparent. Although I enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, this isn’t really my favourite genre. Give me a good crime novel any day (crime is what I go to sleep to!).

Still, I was interested to see what Audrey Niffenegger would do with the family next, particularly after enjoying the first book. Unfortunately, Life Out of Order didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

This time we’re following Alba, Henry and Clare’s daughter, who has inherited her father’s rather inconvenient habit of travelling through time. It’s an interesting idea, particularly when you think about what growing up with that ability might mean for a family.

Niffenegger certainly has plenty of imagination. She takes us into the future, exploring relationships, technology, and the world Alba might find herself living in. There’s a lot to think about, and I can appreciate what the author is trying to achieve.

My problem was the length. At 560 pages, I felt this book could have been considerably shorter without losing much of the story. We move between characters and different periods, and just as I settle into one part of the story, we go somewhere else. After a while, I started to lose interest.

What disappointed me most was that I never really connected with the characters the way I had in The Time Traveller’s Wife. Just as I was getting interested in someone’s story, we were off somewhere else. After a while, I found myself more concerned with keeping track of everyone than caring about what happened to them. That’s a shame, because some interesting characters here deserved a little more attention.

To be fair, readers who enjoy complicated timelines and stories that move back and forth through time may find much more to enjoy here than I did.

I persevered because I wanted to know how it all came together, but I finished feeling that a firmer edit would have made a real difference. At times I wondered whether this might actually work better as a television series. There are so many characters, timelines, and different stories that perhaps giving each of them an episode or two would make the whole storyline easier to follow.

As a novel, though, I felt it was simply trying to do too much. There are some good ideas here, just too many of them for me.