Review - "Outlander"

Oh Outlander.  How I wanted to love you.

So, Outlander fans have been coming out of the woodwork over the past several months, mostly due to the television adaptation on Starz that started this summer.  I had heard so much about these books and how they would change my life, so I started the first one a few weeks ago.  Several weeks ago.  What feels like an entire lifetime ago.

The story is great, it really is.  It's hard to define the genre - it's a combination of adventure, romance (sex), science fiction and historical fiction.  The book is incredibly long and could stand to be about 300 pages shorter with a lot less repetitive detail, but I can see how it will translate into a great TV show.

The premise is about a woman, Claire Randall, who lives in post WWII England and is currently vacationing in Inverness, Scotland with her husband, Frank.  She mysteriously transports through time through a stone structure back to the mid 1730s, where she meets one of her husband's ancestors as well as a group of Scots in the clan MacKenzie who take her as prisoner.  Claire was a nurse during the war and impresses the group with her healing skills, earning their respect and a place in the MacKenzie castle, albeit against her wishes.  To protect her against the impending Redcoats, she is persuaded to marry Jamie Fraser...and now we get to the main reason why anyone with a drop of estrogen chooses to read this book.

Jamie is the perfect man.  There is no other way to describe him.  He is handsome, muscular, sexy, sweet, thoughtful, a virgin.  I don't know that the last part is necessary to make up the perfect man, but it is enticing.  The romance/sex in this novel is over the top, but it serves its purpose and does keep the reader interested throughout.

Halfway through this novel, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on how this blog post would go.  It is thought provoking to think of how one would cope with transporting through time and how much loyalty you would have to a husband who had not been born yet (I'm assuming very little if I were faced with Jamie Fraser).  However, it just kept going and going to the point where I was just flipping through the final chapters so that I could say that I finished it.

All that to say, I give the book 2.5 stars for beating a dead horse, but I highly recommend starting the TV show.  Hopefully the show will engage its audience more than the book does.

~SP