Dragonfly in Amber

Do you know what book cycled REALLY QUICKLY through the BPL system? The second Outlander book, Diana Gabaldon's Dragonfly in Amber. When I put it on hold after finishing Outlander in April, I was like number 70-something in the queue. I got the book from the library in sort-of-late May and finished it June 2. (Yeah, so I'm behind on reviews.)

In this one, Claire and Jamie go to France to try and stop Charles Stuart's disastrously ill-conceived rebellion against the British crown from ever happening. Obviously, all does not go according to plan, although it might be going according to fate. They take over Jamie's cousin's wine business while he is away on a business trip and ingratiate themselves with the Jacobite factions in France, basically trying to get them to write off Bonnie Prince Charlie as a bad bet and not finance his rebellion.

In addition, Black Jack Randall keeps showing up to be an antagonist, continually finding new and inventive ways to be completely awful to Claire, Jamie, and anyone else who's around. Much of the conflict that crops up between Claire and Jamie is related to Claire's desire that Black Jack not be killed until his child is conceived, so that Frank doesn't get disappeared from the future, and Jamie's quite understandable desire to kill Black Jack immediately before he can ruin anybody else's life.

Around this story there's a fun frame mostly from the POV of Reverend Wakefield's adopted nephew, Roger MacKenzie, who meets a now much-older Claire and her twenty-year-old daughter Brianna in 1968 and begins to piece together what happened to Claire back in 1948. And Roger turns out to have some of his own connections to Claire's story, too.

The first thing that really struck me about this book is that it's bleeding enormous, and I say this as someone who likes bleeding enormous books. But this series is really shaping up to be a big, sprawling, hardcore-everything saga. Major, major upheavals occur a few times per book, and this one seems like at least four books in one--the first 1968 section, the France section, the back in Scotland for the uprising section, and the second 1968 section with its plotline about Geillis Duncan.

I like 'em all, though! And I particularly like Claire as a character, although I still think book-Jamie is much more of a jerk than TV-Jamie. But while book-Jamie is less perfect as a romantic object to me, he's still a very, very interesting character, and I think the book does a solid job of examining the aftermath of what happened to him at the end of Outlander and his attempts to reestablish his sense of self.

While there's definitely bits of this book that could have stood to have been edited down a bit, for the most part I think that there's a hell of a lot going on in these 800 pages. One of the major themes is power--both society-wide and individual--and the effects of having power and being put under the power of others has on people. Another major theme, obviously, is whether or not they can influence history, and while I probably could write a whole review just about the How Does Time Work In This Universe question, I basically refuse to have that conversation ever again, so I'm pretty cool with the fact that nobody in the series so far knows anything about it either. There's court intrigue; there's a lot of medical stuff; there's some weird stuff about magic and occultism; there's a lot of people conflating medical stuff and occultism, as usual. Babies and pregnancy also feature heavily in this one, and not in a sugar-coated way--the book explores issues of reproductive choice and coercion, what lineage/heritage do and don't mean, what it means to be a "real" parent, the emotional toll of miscarriage.

Despite my general inability to care about the sex scenes--of which there are a LOT--I've found myself pretty invested in Claire and Jamie's relationship, and not just as a cross-temporal study. I'm freakin' hooked on this series. It feeds my history dorkery, my morbid cravings for horrendously hardcore-everything drama, my "kickass ladies" comfort zone, basically everything. Hopefully one of these books I'll have the time and drive to sit down and do a full proper review that is pages and pages long and is full of my opinions about specific bits of it, but for right now, that just seems too daunting! It's so daunting it's actually been three weeks since I finished the book and I've been putting off writing a review for it. Bad self.