This series is so exhausting. Its first four novels (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, and Drums of Autumn) are relatively consistent in quality, and what I mean by that is that they are generally engaging and entertaining in spite of occasional dull stretches. Then The Fiery Cross is fifteen hundred pages of pure tedium. Then A Breath of Snow and Ashes is really quite good – as good as the first four and maybe even the best of the series except for Voyager. A Breath of Snow and Ashes was the first book in the series that I finished and immediately wanted to begin reading the next book. And then there was An Echo in the Bone – not quite as horrible as The Fiery Cross, but still disappointing and at times just riddled with what seem to me to be rookie storytelling mistakes. Like The Fiery Cross, this novel is dull up until its last hundred pages, at which point it becomes insanely action-packed. I’m so glad to be done with this book and with the series for a while, although I’m sure I’ll read the eighth and final book in the series when it comes out.

One of this novel’s few strengths is the fact that a lot changes in the lives of Jamie and Claire Fraser and their friends and family over its course. Brianna, Roger, and their children left the eighteenth century at the end of A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and portions of this novel concern their new life in the 1980’s. These sections are actually really compelling, and I wish they had made up more of the book. Brianna and Roger move back to Scotland and purchase Lallybroch, Jamie Fraser’s family estate, raising their children not far from the circle of standing stones that first launched Claire into the eighteenth century seven long novels ago. Soon after they move in, they discover a box of letters addressed to them from Jamie and Claire, and they read through these letters slowly, one at a time (as if anyone would ever do that – any real person in this situation would read all of the letters at once, right? Wouldn’t you?) to learn about what happened to their family after they returned to their own time. They deal with the challenges of readjusting to the twentieth century, as Roger reconsiders his call to the ministry and Brianna deals with gender discrimination at her new engineering job and Jem is punished for flaunting his repertoire of Gaelic curse words at his twentieth-century school. There’s more to say about Roger and Brianna’s storyline, which I expect will be featured more prominently in the next book, and I’ll return to them in a bit.

Back in the eighteenth century, the American Revolution is in full swing. Claire, Jamie, and Ian leave Fraser’s Ridge and catch a ship back to Scotland, but they are waylaid by a series of ridiculous incidents aboard a series of ships (I lost track of how many different shipwrecks and shipjackings and whatever the hell else happened during these chapters), and, long story short, they end up at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York just before the battle of Saratoga. However, at least half of the novel doesn’t even deal with the Frasers and the MacKenzies at all, as Lord John Grey and William Ransom, Earl of Ellesmere have been given much more primacy in this novel than in the rest of the series. And here’s the deal: Lord John and William just aren’t very interesting. I very much enjoyed the lengthy backstory in Voyager that dealt with how Jamie Fraser and John Grey became friends, and the fact that Jamie has a secret illegitimate son who also happens to be the earl of Ellesmere and an officer in the British Army during the Revolutionary War is plenty interesting – for what it reveals about Jamie. For himself, though, William is dull as dirt. He is a non-character. He exists only to resemble Jamie and to give Jamie yet one more source of anguish in his life. He has no personality quirks, no excesses, and no vices. He’s a nice guy. At first it seemed as if Gabaldon was going for a comic effect by characterizing him as an inept and bumbling youth (as she did when she first introduced the teenaged Lord John back in Dragonfly in Amber), but she abandoned that strategy by page 200. And the thing is, creating a non-character is bad enough, but if you are going to create a character with absolutely no flaws or vices or quirks of any kind, what you really shouldn’t do is write a fifty-page scene in which that non-character is lost in a swamp and just wanders around for a really long time. But that is what Diana Gabaldon does. And I didn’t like it.

Gabaldon also seems to be developing a new thread concerning Claire’s ancestors, Fergus’ parentage, the French espionage underworld, and Lord John Grey. An individual named Percival Beauchamp appears early in the novel and makes overtures to Lord John, who knew the man by the name of Percy Wainwright in London several decades earlier. Wainwright has married into the Beauchamp family and is on an errand for his brother-in-law, who himself represents the Comte de St. Germain, whom readers might remember from Dragonfly in Amber. We know already that Claire’s maiden name was Beauchamp, and she knows that her ancestry is a mixture of French and English, so she begins to wonder if Beauchamp is an ancestor of hers (we know from Lord John that Beauchamp née Wainwright is a gay man, but Claire doesn’t know that, and the fact that he’s gay doesn’t preclude him from fathering children, of course). This mystery is never solved, and I suspect that it will play a role in the final book. We do learn that Fergus – whom Jamie found living in a whorehouse and working as a pickpocket back in Dragonfly in Amber – is actually the son of the Comte de St. Germain and one of the Beauchamp sisters, who was working as a prostitute when he was born but was actually of noble birth. And some noises are made about how Fergus stands to inherit a rather large chunk of upstate New York – but this plot point was left as well, to be developed further – I presume – in the series’ final installment.

Oh, and Benjamin Franklin is in this novel – naked. Benedict Arnold is in it too, but he has clothes on.

In the past, I’ve complained that Gabaldon wasn’t moving quickly enough in exploring and explaining how time travel works in the world of her novels. Well, in this novel, that complaint is out the window. In this novel, people are time traveling all over the place. First, we learn that Roger MacKenzie’s father likely time-traveled shortly before his death, when the plane he was flying during a World War II training mission was shot down over Northumberland. Then Brianna is inspecting some kind of cave-like thing for her new job as a cave inspector (I don’t think that’s really her title, but all the details of her job – excepting the fact that her co-workers are sexist pigs – are kept rather vague), when she starts to feel the weird feeling that she associates with going through the stones, and she thinks she just barely missed being sucked into another time. Then William Buccleigh MacKenzie – Roger’s ancestor, the one who caused Roger to be hanged back in The Fiery Cross (he survived the hanging, of course, but has a terrible scar and lost his once-beautiful singing voice) – turns up in the twentieth century to harass Brianna and Roger’s children. And then Jem is kidnapped, and his sister Mandy has a dream that he is being sucked into some “scweaming wocks” (here goes Gabaldon again with her appallingly overdone attempts to write the voices of children), and then Jem is held captive in the same cave that Brianna was inspecting, where she felt herself being sucked back in time, and then Brianna discovers that Roger’s study has been ransacked and that some of Claire and Jamie’s letters and other documents pertaining to time travel have been taken or rifled through, and then one of Brianna’s sleazy co-workers shows up and informs her that he has kidnapped Jem so that Jem can take him back in time to steal the gold that various characters have been hiding on various continents at various points in this series.

But for all that development of the time travel motif, not one word is ever said about what was supposedly a “movement” among twentieth-century Native Americans to go back in time and persuade Native Americans to ally themselves with the British rather than with the Americans in hope that the British will thwart the American Revolution and prevent the Americans from being able to exterminate the Native Americans as effectively as they in fact did. Remember Wendigo Donner from A Breath of Snow and Ashes? Remember Otter Tooth, whose skull Claire found back in Drums in Autumn and who appeared to Claire in a dream? Remember the implication, made more than once, that Monsieur Raymonde from Dragonfly in Amber is a time traveler and may have some connection to Otter Tooth and the other Native Americans? Well, none of this is ever mentioned. Gabaldon seems to be taking time travel and running with it in a completely different direction than the one she spent so much time preparing us for.

In spite of the fact that Gabaldon is known for ramping up the action of her books by about a thousand percent in their last thousand pages, most of her novels don’t really end with cliffhangers. This one, on the other hand, ends with about twelve cliffhangers. Nine year-old Jem is kidnapped and locked in a time-travel cave, waiting for his evil gold-hunting kidnapper to come back and take him to the eighteenth century. William Buccleigh MacKenzie is stuck in the twentieth century and may or may not be evil. There are various controversial love affairs popping up among the younger generation: Ian Murray and Rachel Hunter, Denzell Hunter and Dorothea Grey, Henry Grey and Mercy Woodcock, the African-American widow who nursed him after his multiple gunshot wounds (to give you a sense of how far this novel departs from its predecessors, all of these characters except Ian Murray are new in this novel. And we’re supposed to care about them. But we don’t, really).

Oh, and Jamie Fraser has just found out that Claire has had sex with Lord John Grey (WHAT?? you ask. I KNOW.) but has not reacted to it yet. This is the most exciting cliffhanger of all. I mean, considering how he reacted when Claire had sex with the King of France back in Dragonfly in Amber, we should expect some serious Scottish temper tantrums when the series resumes. Be ready.

As I look back over this review, I don’t think I’ve done the greatest job of explaining why this book is boring. It’s true that a lot of things happen (and there are even more plot points that I haven’t mentioned here), but as I’ve said before, the quality of this series seems to me to be directly related to how close the narration stays to Claire and how close the action stays to Claire and Jamie and their nuclear family. I really believe that Claire’s first person voice is the correct voice for this series, and while I suppose Gabaldon has to use the third person sometimes (when she tells us what’s going on with Brianna and Roger in the twentieth century, for example), the chapters upon chapters that focus on William and Lord John and the Hunter siblings and even Ian Murray are just not interesting. Gabaldon is a gifted storyteller, but there is something wrong with her instincts. She seems unable to discern the difference between chapters and scenes that are effective and those that are not – and I guess at this point her series is so popular and she has so many fans that will buy her books no matter what that her editors and publishers feel no need to reign her in. Hey, business is business, and I know that her books do sell well, but I find this narrative sloppiness to be so, so frustrating, because overall this is a series that could be much better than it is. I do feel invested in the characters and the story, and I will certainly read the last book when it’s published (and I have a feeling it’ll be pretty good – at least, it will if she really develops all the plot threads that she left dangling at the end of this book), but I also think I’ll feel pretty grateful that this whole long, meandering, inconsistent journey is over.

A Breath of Snow and Ashes is the sixth novel in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and if you don’t know much about the series, you might want to read my reviews of Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. In particular, the review of Drums of Autumn contains a lot of background information about the series and a quick summary of the first three novels.

This book is SO much better than The Fiery Cross. I enjoy this series (ridiculous and sleazy as it sometimes – no, often - is) and feel invested in it, but when I was reading The Fiery Cross I really lamented that something bad had happened to Gabaldon’s narrative judgment. That book was just unspeakably dull – and it was over a thousand pages long. I was so relieved to find Gabaldon back to her old self in A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

The central tension in this novel is the approach of January 21, 1775. When Claire Fraser was in the twentieth century at the beginning of Voyager (the third novel in this series), she did some research on her eighteenth-century husband Jamie Fraser’s past with the help of historian Roger MacKenzie, who later becomes her son-in-law, and Roger unearths a newspaper article stating that Jamie Fraser and his wife were killed in a house fire on January 21, 1775 and that they left no surviving children. When Claire returns to the eighteenth century, she shares this information with Jamie. They both fear this approach of this date – not only for themselves but for their daughter Brianna and her husband and son, since the article suggests that Brianna will die before this date – but Jamie, as always, remains confident that he can protect Claire and avert this fate.

This novel is full of fire. At its outset, bands of marauders are roaming North Carolina burning down houses. The reasons for these attacks aren’t always clear, but the people of the colony are certainly becoming more and more politically divided as the Revolutionary War approaches, and in some cases the fires seem politically motivated. In addition, Claire and Brianna are becoming more and more adventurous about trying to bring twentieth-century technology to Fraser’s Ridge, and every so often they get a shipment of raw phosphorous or oil of vitriol or some other ingredient for Claire’s homemade ether or Brianna’s homemade matches, and of course these items are flammable, and there’s a constant tension in this novel that the whole place (Claire and Jamie’s house, Brianna and Roger’s house, all of Fraser’s Ridge, all of North Carolina…) will soon go up in flames. I won’t tell you exactly what happens on the twenty-first of January; all I’ll say is that the predicted (or reported – the lines between journalism and prophecy are blurred thanks to all the time travel in these novels) fire both happens and doesn’t happen, and of course Claire and Jamie don’t die, silly, because there are still two more novels to go in the series. Brianna and Roger don’t die either. But you knew that.

One of the reasons I was so frustrated with The Fiery Cross was that it did so little to advance our understanding of how time travel works in Gabaldon’s world. This novel does a lot to rectify that problem. Over the course of the last two novels, Claire has become vaguely aware that at some point a Native American man from the twentieth century (called “Otter Tooth” for the fillings in his teeth) traveled to the eighteenth century and died there. Well, in this novel we meet one of Otter Tooth’s friends, Wendigo Donner. The moment at which Claire meets Donner and learns that he is from the twentieth century reflects Gabaldon at her best: this moment is dramatic, outlandish (no pun intended) and one hundred percent surprising. Here’s how it happens: Claire is in the middle of being gang raped (Gabaldon writes very flippantly about rape in many of these novels – ho hum, yes, there’s more rape going on – so I might as well do the same in my review, although I don’t mind telling you that I feel fairly strange about it), and after one of her assailants leaves, the next arrives, and he leans in as if he is about to begin raping her, but instead he whispers in her ear, “Does the name Ringo Starr mean anything to you?”

I mean, that’s great, right? Trashy as hell, but great – at least insofar as the word “great” can be used to describe a situation that involves gang rape. This moment is as electrifying as the moment in Outlander when Jamie is carrying Claire away from the scaffold where she was about to be burned as a witch and she looks back at her friend Geillis Duncan and sees that she bears a smallpox vaccination scar. It’s been a while – certainly not since Voyager – since Gabaldon surprised me in this way.

The more we learn about the mechanics of time travel, the clearer it is becoming that Gabaldon wants us to consider themes of predestination and fate. Predestination is part of this novel’s subject matter in part because Roger MacKenzie spends part of this novel preparing for his ordination as a Presbyterian minister, and he is expected to pledge his belief in the doctrine of predestination. This theme is important as Jamie and Claire prepare for the expected fire on January 21 as well – does the presence of the newspaper article in the twentieth century mean there is no way that they can prevent the fire from taking place? If the house catches on fire, can they at least save themselves? In Dragonfly in Amber, Claire and Jamie try to interfere with the actions of Prince Charles Stuart in order to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of the battle of Culloden and are totally ineffective – the battle is just as catastrophic as it was when Claire heard about it in the twentieth century. It does seem, though, as if there are small changes that Claire and her family can make from their vantage point as time travelers, and Gabaldon keeps this preoccupation with predestination at the forefront of Claire’s mind throughout the novel.

This novel is more contemplative than others in the series. The point of view sticks much closer to Claire than either of the last three novels, and I think this is a very good move on Gabaldon’s part. Jamie, Brianna, and Roger are still important characters, of course, and some chapters are told in the third person from their point of view, but these diversions are kept at a minimum. As she moves toward what might be the day of her death, Claire spends a lot of time looking back, and she contemplates many of the events of the earlier novels both in her thoughts and in her discussions with Jamie. I can’t tell you exactly why I enjoy this series and why I keep returning to it even after disappointments like The Fiery Cross, but I do think that both Claire and Jamie are fascinating characters and that their relationship – implausible and fantastical as it is, of course – is extremely well drawn. Jamie is both supremely competent at just about every task required of an eighteenth-century male and also inwardly wounded and vulnerable; Claire is smart, intuitive, assertive, and confident, but she also possesses the arrogance of the twentieth-century surgeon that she is: she thinks she should be able to solve every problem and manage every catastrophe, and she needs the eighteenth century to teach her that she too can be defeated. These characters complement and uplift and comfort each other beautifully, and their relationship is, in my opinion, Diana Gabaldon’s great gift to the world of escapist fiction.

Of course there is plenty of silliness in this novel too. The kidnapping and gang rape of Claire is impossible to take seriously; even though such an event would have been horrific if it had happened in real life, I mostly just snorted my way through it. The last hundred pages or so are devoted to the further adventures of Stephen Bonnet, who carries his amputated and bullet-holed testicle around with him in a glass jar and talks openly about his penis (named LeRoi) as if it were the first mate on his pirate ship. The Frasers’ servant Lizzie finds time between bouts of malarial fever to marry both Beardsley twins and bear a child by one or the other of them – no one involved knows which twin is truly the father – and set up house in this comfortable though bizarre threesome. Gabaldon continues her awkward attempts to write the voices of children, and I was just as happy when Fergus, Marsali, and their brood packed themselves off to the city to run a newspaper and the antics of lascivious six-year-old Germain became someone else’s problem. And then of course there are elderly Jocasta Cameron and Duncan Innes and their supposedly chaste marriage – which is chaste because both spouses are having hot and heavy affairs with the slaves.

But whatever. I hardly ever read books that are this silly, but I enjoyed this novel. I am both looking forward to the remaining two novels in the series and also sort of sad that the end of the series is in sight. This novel was just what I needed during a stressful couple of weeks in my life. I needed a book that could provide a true escape, and I most certainly found one.

You know you’re reading a Diana Gabaldon novel when you start making comments to yourself like “Only 400 pages to go.” And if you start putting the words “Oh, good!” side by side with the first statement, you know you’re reading this particular Diana Gabaldon novel.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading this book on a plane. I think I was about 500 pages into it and was not impressed. A woman sitting near me got all excited and said, “That’s the greatest series! Aren’t you loving it?” or something of that sort. Now, I don’t normally talk to strangers on planes. But in this case I made an exception because I really wanted to know what had happened to Gabaldon’s sense of plot and structure in the gap between Drums in Autumn and The Fiery Cross.

“This one is off to a really slow start,” I said. “Does it get better?”

“Yes, it does,” the woman said. “That’s the third one, right?”

“No,” I said, “it’s the fifth.” And then I went back to reading, happy that my usual assumption that all people on planes – except me – are idiots had been upheld.

But seriously. This novel begins with a 271-page segment in which the Fraser family and the many other Highland Scottish families in rural eighteenth-century North Carolina are encamped at an annual event called the Gathering. There is evident political upheaval, as some representatives of the English army arrive to threaten certain individuals (called Regulators) who participated in a recent demonstration against the Crown. Claire Fraser, the novel’s protagonist and a 20^th-century surgeon who has traveled in time and now lives in the eighteenth century, completes some medical procedures on a variety of people and animals – and these, as usual, are grisly and fascinating. The extended Fraser family is preparing for two weddings that evening – that of Claire’s daughter Brianna and Roger MacKenzie, who have been “handfast,” or informally married and raising a child together for some time, and that of Jamie Fraser’s elderly aunt Jocasta and Duncan Innes, whose marriage everyone assumes is being made for the sake of securing Jocasta’s considerable fortune under male oversight. These marriages don’t happen at the Gathering, though, because some English authorities arrest the priest for reasons that aren’t clear until later. On top of all this, Jamie Fraser circulates through the Gathering, dispensing avuncular advice and wisdom upon his friends, family, and tenants, making clear his insatiable sexual desire for Claire, and making subtle inquiries into the whereabouts of Stephen Bonnet, who in Drums in Autumn stole Claire’s wedding ring from her twentieth-century husband, Frank, and raped Brianna, possibly conceiving the child that Brianna and Roger are raising as Roger’s.

Now, I was content enough when I was reading this lengthy scene, and I always feel a certain sense of coming home when I start a Diana Gabaldon novel – the characters as a whole are very compelling – but I was also very aware that absolutely nothing was happening. Characterization was happening, but after approximately 4,000 pages of this series, spread over the four previous novels, characterization is not especially necessary. I paid close attention to details because I assumed that – as in many novels that rely on suspense – the tiniest details from this opening scene would end up bring important in the plot, but in this case, they weren’t. A few characters from this opening sequence come back later in the novel, and the Regulators become important, and we do find out why the English officials detained the priest, but none of these pieces of information are important enough to justify the length of this scene.

The plot of this novel is extremely loose. Jamie does continue to pursue Stephen Bonnet and does eventually find him, and some of the plot threads introduced in the earlier novels in the series – namely that of what happened to the gold that the king of France sent to Scotland in the 1740’s to finance Charles Stuart’s ill-fated attempt to reclaim the British throne – are developed and resolved, but overall this novel consists of characterization, tidbits of information about what it might have been like to live in rural North Carolina in the 1770’s, and not much else.

I’ve already said that Gabaldon’s characterization is one of her strengths. Jamie and Claire Fraser are both extremely compelling characters, as is Jamie’s extended family, some of whom return briefly in this novel, and Lord John Grey, who is present in The Fiery Cross only through his letters. I am not much of a fan of Brianna and Roger, however. Bringing them back to the eighteenth century was probably a good move on Gabaldon’s part – since otherwise Jamie would never have met his daughter (Brianna, who was conceived in the 1740’s and then brought back to the twentieth century in utero and raised by Claire and her husband Frank Randall). However, Brianna is largely uninteresting as a character. She is intelligent and determined, but her stubbornness tends to take the form of whining rather than action. Roger, on the other hand, is nebulous as a character, and it seems as if Gabaldon herself really hasn’t gotten her brain around who she wants him to be. At times he is characterized as inept and bumbling; elsewhere his physical strength and grace are emphasized. He quails before Jamie and seems desperate for his father-in-law to like him, yet Gabaldon also takes pains to emphasize the fact that Roger is descended from both the MacKenzies of Leoch and from the “witch” Geillis Duncan (more on her in a moment), and that he is therefore supposed to be crafty and scheming – but we never really see these qualities in his actions.

The first two novels in this series – Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber – are narrated in the first person from Claire’s perspective. The third novel, Voyager, is more complicated in terms of point of view because one plot follows Claire back in time for the second time from her life in Boston in 1968 to Edinburgh in the 1760’s, where she reunites with Jamie, while the other plot follows Brianna, who stays behind in 1968 to attend college, but who becomes more and more interested in tracking the relationship between her mother and Jamie Fraser (whom at first she does not believe is her father), leading to her relationship with Roger, who in 1968 was a historian specializing in eighteenth-century Scotland. For that reason, Gabaldon inserts some chapters in that novel that are told in the third person, from a perspective limited to either Brianna or Roger. These chapters were not especially frequent and seemed necessary, and they did not detract from the general feeling that the story as a whole belonged to Claire and Jamie. Drums in Autumn also pursues Brianna and Roger’s budding relationship in the twentieth century and then follows them on their separate journeys back in time and their various adventures as they cross the Atlantic (again, separately) to meet up with Claire and Jamie in North Carolina. Again, these shifts in point of view felt necessary and helpful in that novel.

In The Fiery Cross, Gabaldon intersperses Claire’s first person narrative with frequent and, in my opinion, distracting chapters told in the third person from the perspectives of Brianna, Roger, and Jamie. The story as a whole still feels very much like Claire’s, so these interludes seem to me to detract from the narrative as a whole, and they are unnecessary because most of the time all of these characters are together. I tend to assign a lot of weight to point of view in assessing a novel or short story. When selecting a point of view, a writer chooses a set of rules and limitations that she will follow. She can choose any rules she wants, but once she chooses them she needs to follow them. In my opinion, the first person point of view from Claire’s perspective is the right point of view for this novel (though not necessarily for Voyager and Drums in Autumn), and Gabaldon should have done the culling and discerning of details needed to tell the story from Claire’s point of view. There would have been some facts she would have had a hard time working in (and that might have been a good thing), and she would have had to orchestrate some tricks to reveal what some of the secondary characters were thinking and doing, but keeping the novel in the first person would have helped the novel as a whole, in my opinion. Claire’s conflicted loyalties between the eighteenth century (in the person of Jamie, mostly, but also the many other people of that era whom she has come to love) and the twentieth century (represented by Frank, by Brianna, and by Claire’s knowledge of medical procedures of that era and her knowledge of history) is the central conflict of this series, and allowing so much of this novel to be told from the perspective of Brianna, Roger, and even Jamie damages the narrative.

For me, most of the suspense in this series comes from Claire’s ongoing questions about how exactly time travel works. In Outlander, she meets a woman named Geillis Duncan, who is executed as a witch. Claire comes close to sharing this fate, and as Jamie rescues her and carries her away, Claire looks back at Geillis and notices that she has a vaccination scar on her arm. When I was reading Outlander, this revelation shot through me like electricity – it was so well timed and well revealed, and I was ready to sit down and read all 10,000 pages of the rest of the series that night (I didn’t do that, of course, but I wanted to). Later, Claire finds out that before she died Geillis arranged to pass a message to Claire that consisted only of the numbers one, nine, six, and eight. Claire assumes that this message means that Geillis traveled back in time from the year 1968, and in the later novels Claire does discover the younger Geillis Duncan, living in twentieth century Scotland under a different name and cultivating her identity as a witch and nascent time traveler. In Voyager, Claire and Jamie meet Geillis again (this time under the name of Mrs. Abernathy) in the Caribbean, where she teaches them a bit more about the secrets of time travel. In the twentieth century, Roger learns through his historical research that he is descended from William Buccleigh MacKenzie, the illegitimate child of Geillis Duncan by Jamie Fraser’s cousin Dougal MacKenzie. Roger later meets William Buccleigh MacKenzie in the eighteenth century, in one of the more compelling plot threads of both Drums in Autumn and The Fiery Cross.

This novel, unfortunately, almost abandons the question of how time travel works – and this is probably my second greatest disappointment with it, other than the question of point of view. It is truly only in the final chapter of this novel (this 1,443-page novel! surely the topic could have been introduced sooner, right?) that any new information is revealed about the nature of time travel. This information is interesting, and it does make me want to move quickly along to the next novel in the series, but it should have been introduced much earlier than it was.

I will definitely finish reading this series, which consists of two more extant novels and one that is not yet published. It’s not great literature by any means, but it is compelling and intense. Gabaldon has created a world that feels extremely real, in spite of the many, many ways in which she asks her readers to suspend their disbelief. The Fiery Cross was a disappointment, but I didn’t stop reading it and actually looked forward to reading some of it each day, even though I did do a good bit of grumbling about how slow its plot was, how much I missed the earlier novels’ closer focus on Claire, and how much I wanted to learn more about how time travel works in Gabaldon’s universe.

The next novel in the series will remedy these problems… right?