Snuggly blanket, Owl bookmark, and a booklight with fresh batteries!
Outlander is set in Scotland and follows the main character's journey from 1945 to 1743. Talk about a shock! Claire quickly finds herself in quite a bad situation, not sure where she is or what she is doing there. I personally think that I would just sit down and cry if I were in that situation. Imagine that people from 2014 running around the Highlands wondering why their cell phones don't work! Oh look a guy in a tartan, let me take a selfie! I think we would quickly die, which Claire does not do. Although it is close a couple of times, but the main male character Jamie might actually surpass her. Claire is married when she goes into 1743 and spends a fair amount of this book dealing with guilt because as much as she loves her husband Frank, she finds herself falling hard and fast for the stubborn and sometimes quite reckless Jamie. Not that I would blame her, he does have quite a few good traits. She does end up marrying him for protection from the English and that makes the guilt even worse!Sex is a big part of this book and this series I hear! So if that is not something that you like reading about, it's not the book for you. The amount of times that sex, heterosexual and homosexual, happens or is talked about is pretty intense. It's Historical Fiction though so that should not really surprise you because this genre does tend to lean that way. Though sometimes you can work around the sex, I don't think that you can in this book, not without missing big chunks of the plot. I did try to work around the sex scenes but it didn't really work.
It's quite clear that Gabaldon is setting this up to be a series, even if you didn't know that it was one. The characters are learned quickly but share stories of their childhood which is not only a way of showing their differences but a way of letting us know why they are the way that they are. Which is completely fine, I would rather read story after story about Jamie's stubbornness than wonder why he has these traits later but if you don't want to hear about mischievous boys and why they were bent over a fence and beaten then you probably don't want to read this book.
This book deals with Jamie and Claire's relationship starting out, struggles with their differences, many situations where one of them is hunted, imprisoned, almost beat to death, almost burned. Prtty much anything bad that can happen to these characters will. Claire is faced with the decision to go back to her husband Frank or to stay with her other husband Jamie and she does make that and other decisions that she makes may make it so that Frank is never born. At the end of Outlander we don't truly know what is going on with certain points aka Frank's ancestor who is a nasty piece of work. I honestly don't want to give away the whole book.
Now here's the question; did I enjoy it? I did, I liked the book. I wouldn't say that it's absolutely spectacular and it's never going to push out my Lord of the Rings but it is very good and if you like historical fiction (and sex) you'll like it. It has a good story, it was well researched, and it has strong well developed characters! I am going to start Dragonfly in the Amber because I do want to know what happens with Jamie and Claire!