Voyager - Diana Gabaldon (Outlander #3)

Finally, finally, finally I have finished reading this book.  It feels like it's been an eternity.  This is one of those books that I'd pick up, put down, pick up again...walk away from... Honestly, I'm not 100% sure why I continue on with this series, except possibly because I bought them and now read them out of a sense of obligation?  But I only spent like $3 on the seven-book set so that doesn't really make sense.  But my boyfriend's mom likes them, so it gives me something to talk about with her, at least.

This is the third book in the Outlander series and is rather different from the first two in that, for a significant part of the book, Claire and Jaime are apart and so the book isn't entirely, or even mostly, from Claire's perspective.  Instead, a good chunk of it is in third-person perspective and focuses on Jaime, stuck in the 1700s after Culloden and the events after, and Roger, the young man assisting Claire and her (and Jaime's) daughter Brianna with researching what happened to Jaime since at the end of the second book they found out he hadn't died at Culloden after all.  Eventually, of course, they figure it out and Claire goes a-travelling again, and the book resumes is mostly first-person perspective (with one chapter still dedicated to Jaime).

Just like the first two books, this was slow, slow, slow.  I really feel like Gabaldon has a pacing problem that a couple of books hasn't seemed to fix.  There are short bursts of action here, but they're interspersed with these long, long periods of time in which we seem to see nothing but bubbling parritch and people going to and fro on boats.  Additionally, there's not a strong central plot here, which doesn't help matters.  Outlander was about Claire travelling through time and trying to get home and then eventually coming to terms with where she was and who she was with.  Dragonfly in Amber was about Claire and Jaime trying to change history.  Voyager is just about...them getting back together, I guess?  Other stuff happens, of course, but it's mainly a lot of going places by sea and it only really serves to prop up their ongoing reunion.  And also underlying all of this is the fact that Claire and Jaime have become one of those couples where all of their problems boil down to the fact that they don't talk to each other.

However, all of this doesn't mean that Gabaldon is a bad writer.  She has a wonderful sense of imagery and is really able to show the world that she's building, and all of the research that went into it as well as her own sense of supernatural whimsy that underlies much of the goings-on here.  She creates characters that seem whole, even the side characters--for example, we get to see grown-up Fergus in this book, and Jaime's band of smugglers also aren't bad at all.  She just seems to be a bit scattered in what's actually going on, heaving to and fro from one far-fetched scheme for her characters to be involved in to another.  In a more fantasy setting, this might be more forgivable.  However, in a historical setting, even one with a few magical elements interspersed (I mean, our main character is a time-traveler, guys) it reads more as her just making things up as she goes along rather than having a solid and persistent idea of what is actually supposed to be happening in the book.

And is Brianna ever going to become a main character?  She seems far too promising to waste by leaving her in the 1960s when it seems like the story isn't going back there, but every time I think she's going to take the stage, she never does.  Sigh.

2.5 to 3 stars out of 5.  I guess I liked it well enough, but again, there's nothing really compelling in it and I feel like I'm reading more out of some self-imposed duty than out of true enjoyment.  I liked the switch to the Caribbean setting, though, and wish it had been used a bit longer!

Dragonfly In Amber - Diana Gabaldon (Outlander #2)

I have been reading this book for almost a year.  Goodreads tells me I marked it as currently-reading on October 24, 2015.  It's a book that I'd read a few chapters of, put it down (sometimes for months), go back and a read a few more chapters...repeat.  Part of the problem is that I read it on Kindle as part of the full set, so it really just felt like I was never making progress on it.  Part of the problem was that I just didn't find the book that interesting.

This is, of course, the sequel to Outlander, and it's a doorstop.  All of Gabaldon's books are, from what I can tell.  This one starts off a little strangely--while we left our time-traveling heroine, Claire, in the 1700s, we start with her and her daughter, Brianna, visiting Scotland in more modern times.  Brianna is a young woman, and seems to think they're just on vacation.  But Claire has other purposes, and pulls Roger, the son of the genealogy-studying vicar from the first, book into them.  She wants to know what happened to the men of Lallybroch during the '45.  And then, following a Chain of Events, she ends up coming clean to Brianna and Roger about why she's interested...and who Brianna's father really is.  This throws us into the 1745 timeline, which is basically all Claire telling her story, though personally I probably wouldn't have told my daughter quite so much about all the crazy sex her father and I had.  (I didn't really think about this while reading the book, but in retrospect, it's kind of weird.  Sex isn't something to be ashamed of but thinking of your parents doing it is a bit uncomfortable for most of us, I'd wager.)

The thing with this book is...it's boring.  It's a lot of political scheming and a lot of walking/riding/taking boats places, and it doesn't really have the romance of the first one to propel it forward.  Claire and Jamie are still together, yes--but they're already in love, already married, already together, and there's never really doubts that they're going to be anything but, so there's not really the suspense to propel us along on that plot, such as it is.  It's mildly interesting to read about a couple who already got together and how they're facing the trials they run into, but "mildly interesting" is as far as I'm willing to go with that one.  Honestly, I spent most of the book hoping we'd get back to the modern time so we could read more about Brianna, who is clearly the new standout character here, and who I hope goes time-traveling herself in the future books.  Indeed, the "contemporary" part of the book at the end was ultimately far more interesting than the bulk of the story because things were actually happening.  The main body has a few interesting events scattered throughout, but they're separated by such long expanses of nothing that it made the book a real slog in general--hence why it took me almost a year to get through it.  I thought that maybe there'd be some interesting stuff about how Claire's presence and actions in the past affected the present, but there wasn't; her actions don't appear to have "changed" anything.  I want to say that's because we have a circular time paradox on our hands, but I'm just not convinced that Galbadon meant for it to be that way.

I am planning on continuing on with this series, mostly because I'm hoping for more Brianna, but the other books aren't really high on my priority list right now.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon (Outlander #1)

Oh my stars, I feel like I've been reading this book forever.  Looking at the page count, I can see that's almost 900 pages, so that's not that surprising.  What makes it even less surprising is that Outlander contains one of very few things that will significantly slow me down while reading: phonetic accents.  Let me tell you, phonetic accents are terrible.  I hate them.  When people in the NaNoWriMo community ask about using them, my advice is always one word: Don't.  To me, phonetic accents make your character not only harder to understand, but also less intelligent, like they don't know how to speak properly.  Most of the time, a phonetic accent is not necessary to delineate where your characters are from, and that was especially the case here.  We get it, Gabaldon: Most of your characters in this book are Scots.  This is abundantly clear in everything they do, your constant references to kilts, plaids, sporrans, dirks, etc., calling your main character "Sassenach..."  Need I go on?  You didn't need to make me struggle through 900 pages of phonetically-written dialogue, too.

Okay, that aside...this is a monster of the book.  I mean, 900 pages for what basically boils down to a historical romance.  That is a huge page count.  And it's only the first of seven books.  One wouldn't think that it would take a time-travel romance so long to unravel.  I don't think it took that long to build Jamie and Claire's relationship--which, for the record, I did think was well done.  It's a classic, and some would say trope-y, relationship: the warrior and the healer.  Still, it's classic for a reason.  Those two roles allow the leads to compensate for each other's weaknesses, and I also that their personalities matched well.  I didn't mind the main plot: modern woman gets accidentally sent back in time to the eighteenth century and gets mixed up with a bunch of Scots while being pursued by those who think she's a spy.  That said, this isn't exactly a book one can take seriously, despite the amount of mortal peril that comes up.  Plot holes abound, and the plot just keeps going and going and going long after it seems like it should have stopped.  I almost think I would have preferred to see the separate plot points here split up and made into separate stories with separate main characters.

Also...Claire's married.  And while everyone tells her it's totally cool that she has a husband, she can still get married again and it's not a problem at all, I just don't buy that.  There's no excuse for being unfaithful. Well, okay, there are, but Claire doesn't have any of those because she can go back and chooses not to.  So basically she just buys into this whole thing that everyone, including priests(!) tells her about adultery being okay.  Which, considering how adultery was viewed (another woman is pretty much burned at the stake for it!) seems terribly unlikely.  Also I find it hard to believe that more people didn't think Claire was a witch, all things considered.  And as for her treatment for PTSD...uhm...what was she thinking?

As others have said, this book isn't exactly a literary masterpiece, and I have to think that, all told, it was written for exactly the same reason Fifty Shades of Grey was: housewife escapism.  However, I am interested in one of the books later in the series, which looks like it involves Claire's daughter Brianna as more of a main character, so I might keep reading for that purpose alone.  And this did knock out my category of "A book published the year you were born" for the Popsugar challenge, which is good, too.  Overall, it's like others have said: it's junk, but the kind you want more of in a weird sort of way, just like more "traditional" historical romances are--except you could fit three of those into this.  Which I would have preferred...

Anyway, 3 stars out of 5.