More like drums of melodrama.

And so concludes another installment of the madcap adventures of that time-traveling Highlander clan, the Mackenzie-Fraser whatevers. This was the least weird, but most melodramatic of the books so far. It was wacky and I enjoyed it, despite some issues.

In 1767, Claire, Jamie and Ian are fresh from being shipwrecked off the coast of Georgia. In 1969, Jamie and Claire’s grown daughter, Brianna, grows closer to Roger Wakefield, the only other person who knows her family’s secret: they are time-travelers. And Roger, too, is a time-traveler. The two plotlines move separately–Jamie and Claire begin the long, slow process of building a life in the new world, and Bree learns to live without her mother, even as she reluctantly falls in love with Roger. The two stories intersect when Bree finds an article documenting her parents’ death, and she travels back in time to prevent the incident from happening. Roger follows her. All sorts of things ensue. This is an Outlander novel.

A whole bunch of wacky stuff happens in this book. Jamie kills a bear, basically by jumping on it and hugging it to death. Claire gets lost in the snow and meets the ghost of a dead native, who also turns out to have been a time-traveler. Claire operates on a mountain man’s balls. Ian is forcibly adopted by a tribe of Algonquin. Roger helps a couple on a plague ship, who turn out to be his ancestors. Brianna tries to blackmail Lord John Grey into marrying her, otherwise she’ll tell everyone he’s into dudes.  Jamie helps a man escape who was supposed to be hanged. Later, that man steals all their money. Later than that, he rapes Brianna. That last thing isn’t so much wacky as horrifying.

Here’s the thing about these books. Most of that stuff isn’t really all that wacky in context (although it’s really hard to ever read that bear thing, or the ghost thing, in any other way). While I thought the first half of the book was a little too slow, I can appreciate Gabaldon’s impulse to show Jamie and Claire figuring out their new situation, and thankfully as you get towards the middle, she skips years of time so we don’t get too bogged down in unnecessary details. Once Bree and Roger arrive in 1767, the book is relatively fast-paced. (I say relatively, because it’s Diana Gabaldon and she pretty much just does whatever she wants.)

There was a bunch of stuff I really liked. A lot of time is covered, while it does get a bit tedious, mostly Gabaldon skips the boring stuff and shows us intervals of Claire and Jamie setting up Fraser’s Ridge. Also, we see the first inklings of the Revolutionary war. I mostly loved the stuff with Roger and Bree (until her rape and the mix-up with Roger Wakefield/Mackenzie). I loved the scene where Jamie and Bree meet for the first time. Loved Jamie and Willie hangin’ out (although it annoyed me that Gabaldon switched POVs so we could see it). The Gabaldon weird was there, but it tracks with the other weird, sort of psuedo-spiritual stuff we’ve seen (the Loch Ness monster in book one, suggested to be a time-traveling dinosaur?; the magical uterus healing form book two, the voodoo cave magic from book three, etc.) Brianna meeting the Frasers at Lallybroch was delightful, although I could have done without the appearance by Laoghire.

I did have some issues. Really, only a couple, but they’re kind of large ones. Was it really necessary for Brianna to be raped? That makes her the fifth important character to be sexually assaulted. Is this a prerequisite for all of Gabaldon’s characters? Surely she could have found some other way to bring about all the plot-happenings. All this rape, it’s just tiresome. I also hated Jamie being an asshole to Brianna near the end. Roger not accepting baby immediately was out of character for me. That guy worshipped at Brianna’s feet, and I didn’t take him for the territorial type. Surely he would have accepted that baby immediately. I bought he and Bree having ahard time getting back in the flow of their relationship, but not that he wouldn’t immediately decide to be with her. Stephen Bonnet, not sure how I feel about him. It was also a bit frustrating that such major plot happenings hinged on Jamie and Ian mistaking Roger for Bonnet, the servant girl thinking Roger raped her. All of these coincidences feel like lazy, cheesy writing to me, and they mar an otherwise very enjoyable book.

I’ve heard the fifth book is a doozy, and a bit unwieldy. At 1,400 plus pages, I believe this. I will predict right now that I will say in my eventual review of that book that hundreds of those pages could have been omitted without harming the story. Still, I will continue to read on. I’m in it now, and I hope eventually she writes a book that lives up to how much I loved Voyager.