Outlander is one of those books I picked up about a dozen times in various bookstores and then put down without actually buying it. It has a lot of elements I go for–WWII! Britain! Conspicuously well-groomed and progressive men-of-the-past! Time travel!–but for whatever reason, the back of the book never grabbed me. And I heard rumblings that the book had some problems, which I will get to later.
Outlander is the story of Claire Randall, an English woman freshly back from WWII where she served as a nurse in France. She is married to a man named Frank Randall, who is descended from a man who was in the English military in Scotland in the 1740s. Claire ends up travelling through time and getting stuck in 1743, where she is not just out of her time, her very accent (Oxfordshire) places her in danger. She falls in love and has various adventures all while debating a way of getting back to the 1940s. This book is long. Really long. Extended sequence where Claire delivers a foal long.
That scene stands out to me for some reason. It is needlessly, excessively long, and mostly exists to foreshadow another rough delivery later in the book. Both of the births are mostly used to show how amazing Claire is. And while I’m in no way against pumping the tires of a female protagonist, this was already hundreds of pages into the book. If the reader doesn’t get that the protagonist is supposed to be the bee’s knees by then, there are larger issues.
I think Outlander is one of those books that if you like it, you reeeeeally like it. They sucked me in, issues and all. I don’t remember the foal scene, but you are right that Gabaldon loves to indulge in extended medical sequences for Claire that do little to propel the plot. The 8th book as one I was sure the author put in just because she found it fascinating.
I think maybe because I snagged on the problematic parts (everything about Jack Randall), I was unable to get into the more slide of life parts (pretty much everything else). I just started to feel like it was problematic thing; extended not-particularly-exciting, but maybe interesting thing; problematic thing; have we talked enough about how awesome Claire Beauchamp-Randall-Fraser is recently? Sort of felt like I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
All of this makes it sound like I don’t like Claire! I did and I do.
Outlander is a series you enjoy because it takes place in a time and with people you want to spend time with. The pot is often meandering and if book #1 ruffled your feathers, forget the later books. The meandering gets multiplied as each new book introduces additional main characters, until you’re essentially only popping in on Jamie and Claire every 150 pages or so.
I love the first three books and enjoy spending time in those meandering waters, but even for me, the later books become a bit tortuous.
I think maybe I just got burned on meandering stories when I read Wheel of Time (quit right before Path of Daggers). Now there is a series that wanders. You think Game of Thrones is bad. Whoo, boy.
I think my perception of the books is definitely colored by the fact that we’re always in Claire’s head. If a different narrative convention was used, you’d get to spend more time with Gellis or Ned–both of whom seem like they have fascinating backstories.
Oy Vey – the Wheel of Time. I tried so hard but found myself skimming early on. There’s so many paragraphs about them hiking, gathering wood, making fire. Yeah, we get it – they’re CAMPING. Move on already :P
The later books use more POVs! You might have better luck with 2 or 3. The third one is my fave. I loved it so much. Five star worthy. The fourth one is where it starts to go off the rails a bit, for me. The fifth one was interminable. Two stars and yuck. I’m reading #6 later this month. We’ll see how that goes!
Really interesting to read a mostly-negative review. In a way, I agree with everything you said, but at the same time, the way I appreciated the characters themselves left me with an overall positive impression. Like Alexis says, plot is almost secondary, and definitely contributes to an overall weakness of the series — particularly as it progresses — which is that sometimes it can’t seem to decide if it wants to be an adventure story or just a “slice of life in the 18th century” story, so you’ll get extended sequences of Claire performing surgery interspersed with actually interesting historical events.
I LOVE the slice of life parts of the story, often more than the Perils of Pauline adventure elements.
Many of the “slices” are interesting, and many of them are extended sequences on how heavy and full one’s breasts are when full of milk. It’s… uneven.
The medical stuff is really interesting, I will grant you. Because even Claire’s “modern” medical knowledge is behind what we have now. I work in a medically-related field, so that part I actually found really interesting. And while I don’t know a tremendous amount about Scottish history, I am a history nerd.
I think I….. Hang on, I’m gonna put an author’s note in separate comment, cause maybe this will provide context to my reactions to the book.
Author’s Note:
I completely believe that a reader’s personal circumstances GREATLY influence how they react to a piece of work. As someone who suffers from Depression, I can point to specific books and movies where my reaction was sort of “well, I hated it, but given the mood I’m in, I would have hated literally anything.” And while that’s not what happened here, it is related.
I am a hockey fan, more specifically an LA Kings fan. And I don’t want to take up a bunch of time talking about sports fandom here, but let’s just say it’s been a rough time to be a woman who likes hockey recently. I won’t list the crimes various players on various teams are accused of because it does a disservice to how complicated the issues involved are.
I think my reaction to Outlander was colored by my utter exhaustion at misogyny and homophobia is sports culture. Which is maybe unfair to the book. I stand by what I wrote because it’s how I feel about the book, but I might have been better able to surmount some of the issues, were I not so otherwise rundown.
If all that makes sense.
Of course! And the exhaustion you feel at this stuff continually popping up when you just want to enjoy something, guilt-free, can be compounded even more by overthinking it and wondering if you are just unnecessarily placing these burdens on yourself; if everyone else can just be entertained, why can’t you?
I totally get all that, and it’s a comment I make every time I review an Outlander book, is that all of the sexual violence is just… a lot. So you’re not alone there, and definitely not obligated to try to enjoy something more than you do.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less able to let stuff slide.