Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I still remember how excited I was nine years ago for The Fiery Cross. I had torn through the first four books in a matter of days. My mother and my best friend had read them too and we were constantly dissecting the subject of Jamie and Claire and their adventures. I stalked online message boards devoted to the series and even started going to Scottish festivals as a result of picking up an interest in the culture from reading the Outlander series (and watching Braveheart). In short, I was a huge, diehard fan. Even though the fourth novel, Drums of Autumn, did not live up to my expectations, I still enjoyed it and finished it within four days. I considered it the "breather" book and was certain that The Fiery Cross would bring back the adventure and the romance I had fallen in love with. I had it on preorder for months through Amazon and finally the day came when the book was delivered to my door. Weeks later, the book still sat by my bedside, half-finished. The first "day" in the book took us through 150 pages of rainy, muddy, slow-moving banalities. The passion of Jamie and Claire had been reduced to a mockery of its former self. As a replacement for their epic love, Gabaldon offered in its stead the relationship between the whiny, spoiled Brianna and the extremely nice and sensible but passionless Roger. Brianna delivered her baby and a large majority of the story was given over to the baby crying and pooping and nursing while Brianna nursed and pooped and cried about how hard it is to be a mother (...really?! Who knew!). The descriptions of the mundane aspects of 18th century daily living go on for pages and pages and pages. In one scene, Claire roots around in the baby's poopy diaper in order to recover a trinket that the baby has swallowed. That scene is a perfect metaphor for the novel as a whole; indeed, the reader may wonder how much more you-know-what he has to dig through in order to uncover the plot. Gone is the magic thread woven through the first three installments of the Outlander saga; that alluring fabric of adventure and mystery is replaced in the Fiery Cross by a diary-like retelling of events more appropriate to a history text than a work of fiction. Gabaldon gives the sense that she has done her research and we are darn well going to listen to what she has to tell us whether we like it or not. Her prose remains poetic, but it's not enough--lacking any semblance of plot, peril, or character development (excepting a brief aside in which she tortures her favorite whipping boy, poor unlucky Roger), the novel falls flat on its rather voluminous face. I eventually finished The Fiery Cross, but only after sitting down one weekend and literally forcing myself to read the last half of the book. My best friend and my mom never did finish. I used my copy as a doorstop for some years, until the book finally made its way into a thrift store bag. I still have the first four novels on my shelf and have reread Outlander a couple times, but the entire series has lost its appeal now that I know the faded fates of my favorite characters. The subsequent books in the series do not interest me--looking at the size of them, it seems as though they must be even more full of the mind-numbing minutiae that ruined The Fiery Cross and to a lesser extent Drums of Autumn. It does seem that some of her fans enjoy the myriad of small details, looking upon the sequels as a series of sideways-related vignettes, but for those of us who followed Outlander for its passion and adventure and pluck and strength of story, the series is over.