After a friend and former coworker recommended and lent me this book about, oh, eight years ago, and after I left it sitting on my shelf for four of those years before finally returning it, unread, and then after starting and stopping and restarting and re-stopping it last year, I finally, finally read this book.
Let me be clear: I didn't set down this book because of any great deficit on its part.
Overall, Outlander is everything you'd expect a romance about a woman thrown back in time into 18-century Scotland to be.
The premise is just that, as I'm sure you know. (If you haven't read the book, surely you've heard of the TV show.) Claire is a former combat nurse visiting Scotland with her husband on a second honeymoon. She wanders through a circle of stones, touches one, and finds herself in 1743.
There she meets Jamie Fraser, a young, attractive Scottish warrior. Claire tries to return home, but is thwarted again and again. And then, as her connection with Jamie grows, she questions whether she truly wants to go home. The two times are irreconcilable, and yet she is torn between them, and between the two men who've taken hold of her heart.
Claire deals with external and internal conflicts, and also questions the effect of her actions on the future. But at the heart of this story, it is a romance. There is passion, and violence, too, and emotion. It's a love story, and judging from the eight other books in the series, quite an epic one at that.
I enjoyed this book. It really solidified my want of visiting Scotland. Plus, something about a man in a kilt...
There are problematic parts to be sure. There is a lot of talk about, threats to, and actual, rape (told after the fact), and other violence, too.
The writing itself is good. Far better than most general romance stories. It's rich in both historical research and imagery, and the author, Diana Gabaldon, handles her characters with care.
If you're after some sort of life-changing, world-changing literature, a tome that has you question society and morally reflect on the implications of existence and time, well, this isn't it.
But it is highly readable. Once I got into it, I sped through it. And that's saying something, for my copy was 850 pages.
And, at the end of the day, it will stick with me. I poured through the pages, blushed at some parts, and wondered at others when I had to leave my book all alone on my nightstand.
It's a very well-done romance about a woman torn between times and loves. It has sweeping, brooding landscapes, and danger, and passion. And sexy, manly men in kilts. It does that very well.
Still, I don't really have any burning desire to read the rest of the books in the series. So I shall leave Claire and Jamie and their world.
And, to illustrate my absolute bias in reading this book, a picture of me and my husband on a train on our way to the Jane Austen ball last spring. (Read about that here.) See what he's wearing? A kilt.
So yeah. Biased.
It seems most ladies have read this novel. Have you? What's your opinion? I haven't watched the TV show yet either - though I likely will. Who's seen it? Do you recommend it?