The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Genre: Fantasy
Format: Digital audio book borrowed from library
Publication date: 2012

My 3-star rating of this book is an average of what I would rate it for myself (2 stars) and what I would rate it for everyone else (4 stars). Rating a book on a five-star scale is not the easiest thing to do, especially when it is in a genre I don't usually read. I recognize that Mitch Albom is a good writer and that most people would be moved by this fable about living in the present, but the lessons it sought to teach felt obvious to me.

As I said, The Time Keeper is a fable. It starts off with the story of Dor, the first man to discover how to track time. Dor is consumed with knowing things like when the sun will come up and when the full moon will come again. He conducts his experiments and finally creates the first clock. Dor is punished for the audacity to quantify days and is banished to a cave for 6,000 years, after which he is given a mission to find two people and teach them what time is really worth.

The minimal amount of dialogue was one thing that made it difficult for me to get through this book. The majority of the book was filled with the somber tone of the narrator telling me the stories of Dor and the two people he chose for his mission, an elderly man named Victor and a teenage girl named Sarah. Victor is at the end of his life and obsessed with the idea of cheating death while Sarah is an overweight teenager who can't find anything good about her life.  Even with so much time spent learning about their lives, I didn't feel much of a connection to any of them.

There didn't feel like there was much action, either, for most of the book. Although the lesson was obvious to me before I finished listening to the prologue, I still kept wondering where the book was going. Why am I learning about the lives of these three characters? It wasn't until 3/4 of the way through the book when all three of their lives intersect that my interest picked up, but even then the lessons that Dor taught Victor and Sarah and the ones he learned himself were very obvious.

One of the best things about the book for me was the narrator, Dan Stevens. His English accent went a long way in helping me get through this. Also, the audio book is only five hours, so if you are interested in sampling Albom's writing, it is fairly short.

Here are a few lines from the book that Albom used to shove the lesson in the reader's face, albeit gently:

Sometimes, when you are not getting the love you want, giving makes you think you will.

We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.

When you are measuring life, you are not living it.

Despite the melancholy vibe, the ending wasn't as much of a downer as I expected. Overall the book reminded me of those stories that circulate on Facebook about how people who don't realize how good their lives were until it was too late. If I were to recommend it, I would say that it might appeal to the readers of books like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, if they can get through the first half of the book.

 The Time Keeper at Book Depository (affiliate link)
The Time Keeper at OverDrive