bloodygranuaile

The last book I read in 2015 was the fourth installment of the Outlander franchise, Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. At this point, Jamie and Claire have arrived in the semiwilderness of the colony of North Carolina, ten years or so before the American Revolution. There are a lot of Scotsmen in North Carolina. Some of them fled impoverishment and persecution to set themselves up as plantation and slave owners, following the grand American tradition of fleeing persecution to engage in a little persecution of one's own. Other Scots have come over via indenture, either voluntary or involuntary. (Hell, I think some of the came over via involuntary indenture and bought slaves once their indenture was over; people can be shitty like that.)

In contrast to the last book, which I call "Highlanders of the Caribbean" even though that's not actually its name, Claire and Jamie mostly stay in North Carolina through this one. They meet another one of Jamie's unnumerable relatives, a badass, blind old lady named Jocasta Cameron, who welcomes them and immediately starts scheming to put Jamie in charge of her plantation so that other people stop trying to marry it out from under her. This doesn't sit too well with either Jamie or Claire, since the plantation comes with a great number of slaves and can't be maintained without them, and, since Claire and Jamie are our heroes, they can't possibly countenance slave ownership. Instead, Jamie runs off and starts rustically homesteading a nearby patch of woodland he calls Fraser's Ridge, and it's all very Little House on the Prairie for a bit, except for being woodland instead of prairie.

It's Claire's daughter Brianna, it turns out, and Geilis Duncan's descendant Roger Wakefield who do the bulk of the traveling in this book. After finding a death notice for Claire and Jamie Fraser for 1776, Brianna travels back through the stones at Inverness to warn them. Roger follows once he figures out what's going on, and they each make their way to North Carolina, miraculously not dying, although they certainly meet up with their share of terrible and slightly cliche adventures, including Roger getting kidnapped by Mohawks and Brianna getting raped by a pirate. Honestly, if the plot weren't buried under such a great amount of detail and strong characterization, it would probably be awful -- most of the plot points in this book are pretty overdone in either romances or historical fiction. A huge chunk of the adventuring in the second half of the book comes from the sort of idiotic miscommunication that could have been easily cleared up by conversing like normal humans instead of romance novel twerps. Jamie is all Jealous Father about Roger, and Brianna of course gets pregnant immediately upon becoming sexually active. Some people think the book might need a bit of editing down, since it is rather enormous, but I think that would be a mistake. It's the huge amounts of ridiculous research, tiny details, wacky secondary characters, and psychological meanderings through the minds of the main characters that really make the book something worth reading, at least if you're a history nerd looking for some exciting and slightly trashy melodrama that doesn't insult your intelligence.

I'm definitely going to keep up with this series, probably no matter how overblown it gets. It's just too much fun.