Disclaimer! If you haven’t read the previous six books in the series, there will be minor spoiler in this review. Proceed at your own risk.
Having finally completed my epic re-read of the previous books in the series at a page count total that is frankly obscene, I finally got to read a new to me Diana Gabaldon. When this book first came out in 2009, I just didn’t have the energy to expend on re-reading the whole series to catch up and I decided to just put it off. With book eight in the series being published earlier this year, the very entertaining TV series making me remember what I love so much about Gabaldon’s writing and the excellent online company/support group I am part of over on Facebook to discuss the books with, I was a lot more motivated to get through the series now. Yet it still took me more than a month to get through this.
There is so much I love about Gabaldon’s writing. Jamie and Claire have been part of my life for a very long time, and I generally find most of the stuff involving them very interesting. But since pretty much book 3, these books aren’t really just the continuing adventures of Jamie and Claire Fraser in the 18th Century. There’s Brianna and Roger and their kids, now back in Scotland in the early 1980s (which I’m freaking out about a bit, because that’s within MY lifetime). There is Jamie’s best friend, Lord John Grey, who, when he’s not trying to figure out why his niece is pretending to be madly in love with his stepson and hell bent on going to America to be reunited with him, goes about doing not much of anything obviously important or interesting for two thirds of this book. There’s said stepson, Jamie’s illegitimate offspring, William, the Eight Earl of Ellesmere, who is now a soldier in the British Army. He gets recruited for spy missions, but doesn’t seem very good at it. He travels to Canada and back. There are letters between him and his stepfather which may be super interesting for people who are a lot more into the American War of Independence than I am, but to me, it was the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. So much boring.
Full review.
I bought this and never managed to get farther than the first 200 pages or so. In fact (hangs head in shame) I may have given up and donated my copy to the library books sale. But based on your review maybe I’ll have to check a copy out of the library and check out the final 1/3 of the book prior to digging into Heart’s Blood.
I’m sure that if you enquire with some of the other Gabaldon fans on the Facebook group, someone will pretty much be able to tell you the exact page number of where th story starts getting good. You can wiki the rest of the plot later. Confession, when I was seriously wondering why I was still reading, I did look up the plot on Wikipedia just to see if I should keep going. Having confirmed that things did indeed take a turn for the more interesting towards the end, I stopped reading the detailed summary and pressed on with the book.
also appears to be only about 850 pages long, so the shortest book in the series for ages.
I suppressed what would have been an overly-loud chuckle at this.
That is what my life has become now. I am considering a book with that page count as short. If I manage to complete it before New Year’s, it’ll still be the second biggest book I read this year (I think). I shall have to save Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archive tomes until next year.
re: stormlight. That series was my introduction to Sanderson and I think they’re fantastic, so I picked up the first three Mistborn books (his first original books) and am finding them worlds away from Stormlight quality. I’m looking forward to discussing this with you when you feel up to another giant series to dig into :)