I’ve finally gotten myself back to the saga of Claire and Jamie Fraser with this, the third in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. It’s been about a year since I read Dragonfly in Amber, and I’ve very carefully kept away from the Fraser clan since then, because I knew if I read the books too close together I’d get sucked in and there was no way I would stop reading before getting totally caught up on the series, which would mean I’d be finishing Written in My Own Heart’s Blood right around now, and then I’d be S.O.L. until Gabaldon gets around to publishing the next book. And I have no intention of being S.O.L. where Claire and Jamie are concerned, at least not for a good long while.

Voyager starts pretty much were Dragonfly in Amber left off—Claire and her daughter (with Jamie) Brianna are in Scotland with Roger Wakefield in 1968, and they have just figured out that Jamie didn’t die at the Battle of Culloden in 1745. They start trying to figure out what happened to him after Culloden. Where I am right now, they’ve learned that he hid out in a Cave near Lallybroch, the family home in the Scottish Highlands, for the better part of seven years, until he arranges to get caught by the British Army so his tenants can claim the price on his head so they can eat (there’s a famine on in Scotland). He goes to prison in Ardsmuir, and after a few years there, Lord John Grey becomes the head officer there. You’ll remember John Grey. Gabaldon likes to write books about him too, and Bethany likes to mock them a bit. He made his first appearance in Dragonfly in Amber, when he was a teenager, and Jamie saved him from something prior to Culloden. Lord John is a homosexual, and falls in love with Jamie, and that fact leads him to help Jamie out on many occasions. I suspect his presence at Ardsmuir will be advantageous to Jamie. But I haven’t read ahead, or cheated by reading plot summaries on Wikipedia. Nope.

And that’s pretty much all that’s happened so far. I’ve only just reached page 100, but things are zipping along. I don’t love that Jamie and Claire aren’t together, and I will admit to having skimmed ahead a bit to see how long I have to wait until I get to read their “magical” reunion. I honestly thought it was going to be a much longer wait—only about two hundred more pages. But since Voyager is close to nine hundred pages long, that doesn’t seem like very many pages to wait.

More later!