Reuniting with the Frasers

I finally finished An Echo in the Bone, the latest (seventh!!!) Outlander book by Diana Gabaldon. I say "finally" not only because the book is 814 pages, but also because it was interrupted by me reading Anna Karenina for my book club--not exactly a small book, either.

I frequently recommend Outlander to friends; it's a great read, fabulous characters, well-written. "But," I say, "stop after the third book. It's all downhill from there." And Echo did nothing to make me change my mind. I had high hopes going into it; I had liked A Breath of Snow and Ashes (book six) more than The Fiery Cross (book five, whose first 200 pages dealt with one day). In my mind, really, Gabaldon should've just stopped as soon as Claire and Jamie, the two main characters, arrived in the American colonies from Scotland.

(If you haven't read any of the books, they're about Claire, a woman from 1946 England, who winds up traveling through time to 1740s Scotland and marrying Jamie. They wander around Scotland, try to stop the Rising of 1745, Claire returns to the future, has their daughter, becomes a doctor [she was a nurse during WWII]. Jamie winds up in prison, fathers a son, gets released from prison. They're reunited when Claire realizes Jamie didn't die at Culloden, and then they go the the American colonies. Their daughter follows them, with her husband [he maybe came after her? I can't remember]. Stuff happens. The daughter, her husband, and their kids return to the 20th century. Consequently, this book was split between Claire and Jamie [and miscellaneous other characters] in America during the Revolution and Brianna and Roger in the 1980s.)

As you can tell from that most broadest of outlines, there's a lot to keep track of. Which is a huge problem. Gabaldon regularly goes 4 years between publishing her books, so when I read this one, it had been about 3 years since I read the previous one, and probably a good 2 or 3 before that that I read Fiery Cross. Though my mind can retain a LOT of random crap, I can't remember every single flipping character from this series, so when a character who was important two books ago showed up, I had no recollection of him, much less an idea of the specifics of his relevance in the story. I managed to piece most of it together, though I'm still hazy on details.

She really just needs a good editor who will actually tell her to cut things. She gets really, really into the details. I guess for some people it's interesting to read about numerous surgeries, but I don't need it. And the pacing of this book is all wrong. It's pretty slow to go through, and then everything happens in the last 150 pages or so. And nothing gets wrapped up. It's all cliffhangers at the end, which hasn't been the case with the previous books. Earlier books wrapped up the main plots, but left the door open for the story to continue. This leaves the reader hanging, which is one thing when you're watching a tv show and know that you have a few months to wait. But if I have to wait another 4 years, I'm going to be incredibly frustrated.

I think what's frustrating me, really, is that I do still care about Claire and Jamie, and even Bree and Roger, but as soon as we get into the countless side characters...I can't care that much. I can't maintain that much depth of feeling for that many characters over that many books over this many years. The earlier books were told entirely from Claire's perspective; I think the series started going astray when we got narration from more and more characters.

Gabaldon needs to bring it back to Claire and Jamie; unfortunately, at this point, she can't. I'll keep reading until the series ends (theoretically in another book or two, but it was originally supposed to only be a three-book series, so who knows?), but I'll continue to urge others to stop after Voyager, the third book. After that, it's not worth it.