Overall Reading Experience
I halfway liked this book.
It was an okay way to start the year off. I feel like last year I was kind of halfway reading things or I just couldn’t find a title that really captured my attention. I felt like I was reading the same story with the same tropes with all the same characters. I just feel like writers aren’t doing a good job at making me invested in their characters. Maybe I’m just not reading the right books. I thought I knew what books interest me but now that I’m a little older, I feel as though that is something that I have to rediscover.
Outlander helped rediscover the reasons why I loved romance to some degree.
I felt like it followed the standard romance procedure. You know the whole girl likes a boy, girl goes off and meets new boy and falls in love and now has to choose. I guess I love a good love tryst done right, none of this other fuddy duddy shit they’re pulling these days. It was a simple yet complex love story filled with many fantastical and historical elements. I enjoyed learning more about the Scottish and their beliefs but I can’t help but be reminded of a YouTube thumbnail I saw about how people should stop using Scottish heritage, mythology, or history as place settings in fantasy novels. I hope I’m reciting that right, I only saw it in passing but it intrigued me enough to stay with me. I never realized how much fantasy is reliant on their history or beliefs.
The novel itself focuses on the witches, faeries, and water monster aspects of their myths. However, it wasn’t the central theme like a normal fantasy book would do. While that was nice, I do wish that it had even more of those elements. It added some whimsy but it was still tinted with skepticism. I have to remind myself that this isn’t a fantasy book and the war that is being mentioned is real lmao.
The main focus was Claire’s search of home and self as well as the war she had just found herself in the middle of. A war I knew nothing about.
I paid attention in my history classes, I took APUSH and scored a 3 on my placement test. So you could say I’m something of a scholar. But if you know the American school system then you know that they aren’t going to say shit about wars in foreign countries. I thought because it was a predominately white country I would’ve at least heard a whisper of this war but sadly not. It didn’t take away too much that I didn’t have any prior knowledge. The war was also kind of treated like background information.
Despite it being historical, Outlander is a romance novel to its core. Aint no shame in that game. I thought that the romance was lovely. It had layers and longing. It wasn’t all consuming in the sense that it felt like the entire book and subplots were about the love story. It was two normal people trying to do whatever they could to keep each other alive so that they could be together. Choosing each other despite everything going wrong or not how they planned. Watching them bond with each other made me feel giddy and giggly.
Where there is romance, there is sex and intimacy. And there is so much sex in this book lmao and I kind of knew that was going to be the case.
It’s a Starz tv show for crying out loud. Plus when I watched the first episode you could just feel the sexual tension. Even in the books, the first couple chapters it’s so palpable. The sex was okay. It was passionate at times and rough. It didn’t feel like the central driver of the plot but I could get the sense that it was going to be used to advance the plot. Not my favorite kind of sex scene but it’s what we were working with.
I did think it was interesting to have the main character be older than her love interest as well be more sexually experienced. You get to see Jamie’s journey as a lover and a fighter. Pun intended. They literally do it right after a battle because she was turned on. I get it, displays of power in a way can be very sexy. When I see a men do stupid shit like lift heavy things or fight it’s kind of does it for me. Jamie is just a rough and gentle inside and outside of the bedroom. He is just as eager and curious and driven. Nice qualities to have in a lover. I found that there were some funny moments during their intimate moments or leading up to those moments that reminded me of my own experiences. The awkwardness of it all, the shyness, the anticipation, that wanting and needing, the longing. All the things I missed in the sex scenes I’d been reading before. The sex felt realistic and that was nice. Not at lot of theatrics. Thankfully there was no roaring or slamming to the hilt being mentioned. They weren’t like 20 pages either. I love sex but there has to be some kind of plot.
The writing was decent. I think I expressed in my earlier post about this book that I had no big qualms with the writing. Having to look up words because I didn’t know them was a pain but I didn’t think she was using big words on purpose to sound smart. There was a lot of build up and anticipation. I couldn’t quite tell where the story was going to go. It was nice to have something that wasn’t so predictable.
She did an overall good job at getting me to care about characters and their motivations. Some I cared about more than others. The world building and politics were understandable probably because I live in this universe. There wasn’t too much that I had to suspend disbelief for. The relationships in the book added depth and understanding to the world. You got to see how the society functioned and what the people were like. You saw how superstitious and distrusting they were in this time period. I really enjoyed the relationship between Claire and Gellis Duncan. I loved Gellis. She was so interesting and cunning. She was mysterious and had many riddles about her. I could tell that she knew things that others didn’t know, not quite in the way that Claire knew but similar. She was the one character whose motives I couldn’t figure out. That’s what made her so intriguing. We eventually find out and I was lowkey kind of surprised and made for a real page turner.
All in all, the tale is gripping enough to make me want to read the second book, however I am a little skeptical about why this series is 8 books long but you and I will find that out together lol. I almost thought that this book would’ve faired better as just a onetime novel kind of thing. But there are plot holes that need to be wrapped up I guess. The ending of the book didn’t really make me feel like there was much else to be resolved besides the war.
I was not happy with the end of the book. Lowkey not sure if I’m going to like the direction on the book might take. Also hope we get some more plot… I feel like the reason I couldn’t anticipate anything was because I could not follow the plot.
I hope the second still has the elements that I like in the book and include more that I want.
The Abode 