I hope you all enjoyed your holidays-- I did. Did you miss me during the hiatus? Don't answer that question, it's rhetorical.
I thought I'd start the new year off with a bang, and no, I'm not talking about the heavy mortars that the men in my family launched off rather close to the ground. They were big, they were colorful, they were loud. I was blinking the sparks out of my eyes for at least a minute. I'm pretty sure there were people on the hillside nearby clapping. We took a proud bow.
The "Outlander" series has been around for a while, actually, but it's only just now come up on my radar as something I should read. I've had countless people tell me about it, and finally, at the urging of my Mema, my cousin, and my aunt, I started making an actual effort at keeping my eyes open. I now have my hands on the first book, thanks to my Mema again, and have read nearly 500 pages in three and a half days. I'll let that speak for itself for a moment.
I'm told that this is only the first out of 7 books-- currently waiting on an eighth-- so you have to go into this understanding you're in for the long haul, as the first book itself is roughly 800 pages. That's a whopper for the beginning of a series, in any genre. However, if the first book is anything to go by, as soon as I get my hands on the other novels, these books will fly. 500 pages-- three days. I don't think this novel will even last me the trip to London that I'm taking in a couple days.
"Outlander" is a historical fiction about a woman from post-WWII England who finds herself somehow thrust back into 18th century Scotland along with all of the Scottish/English strife, time-period struggles, and other delights (both literally and sardonically) that go with. Take this as a clear sign as to the merit of these books: I hate historical fiction. It usually reads to me, as a genre, as if someone were trying to work too hard to make their time period and setting ring with veracity, which just makes everything feel like a text book gone horribly, horribly wrong. The attempt to make an historical fiction sound both historical and fictional just fails with me, on both counts.
This book is the first exception to the rule. Every historical detail is woven seamlessly through the story, almost as if subconsciously, so that in the reading you are never distracted from the story even as you are being loaded with historical, societal, and cultural threads. Because of course, the main character is learning all about the time and the society and the culture, and yet there are no 'lecture' paragraphs where one learns that -insert historical fact here-. I have not skipped over a single paragraph in this book, in all of the 500 pages I have read so far, and I don't think I shall do so.
Of course, I must also put out there that this is a romance novel. I was not quite aware of that at the time I began the book (I don't have anything against romances, just so you know, but if there's a picture of a shirtless man on the front with a half-bared woman in his arms, I tend to pass on by), and while I have not come across anything that I would deem...I suppose ridiculous is the word I would use, or perhaps tacky or in extremely poor taste...hmmm...not your penny-romance-novel, I guess is what I mean...anyway, nothing like that has come across my reading, but this is a book I would rate Mature. Ahem. So choose to read it or not with that in mind.
Well, whether or not that is adequately explained, I can't put this book down, and I really can't wait to see what happens. This is one of those books that I read, wishing I could read faster to find out what happens, and yet wishing it wouldn't stop. I do, however, have six other books awaiting my perusal once I am done and have some means of acquiring them. I certainly can't complain.
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