DIANA GABALDON

Outlander

4 stars (Good Read) - I found this book enjoyable, although the time travel concept got me a bit. I also recommend Time Camera by Terence Lee which looks at the subject from a different perspective. 4 stars (Gabaldon's Imagination Makes Her Historical Tale Easily Believable) - Adventurous twenty-eight-year-old Englishwoman Claire Randall finds herself in the time right after the end of the Second World War, returned to marriage with a man she barely knows. She had wed her husband in a fit of romantic passion right at the outbreak of the war and then been separated from him for most of the next six years. She is now unhappy and does not exactly know what to do. Relations with her nominal husband are strained and she is full of regrets. In an effort to reconcile, the couple takes a last ditch vacation to the far north of Scotland, and there Claire, when walking alone one morning on the mist-covered moors, visits a standing stone legendary for its mysterious magic. All this is established right away in this novel, which then morphs into what is neither a science fiction tale, a romance story, straightforward history, nor a fantasy, yet which contains elements of all those genres. On that morning at the stone, Claire is cast backward in time to the same spot in the Highlands, in the 1740's, and there, alone and understandably bewildered, she must survive in a landscape both familiar and foreign. In this brutal past she weathers the first hour of her voyage backward only to be confronted by a band of marauding English soldiers who think her "scanty" modern dress is the mark of a harlot. These troops, whose task it is to pursue bandits and rudely keep the peace during a time of instability, intend to fall upon Claire with wicked intent. She is rescued as a result of a chance encounter with rebel fighters and taken in by Scottish clansmen who reside in a vast castle by a loch. Claire is treated with suspicion but respected for her medical skills (she had been a nurse in ...
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