My Irish Eyes are Smiling When Scottish Kilts are Flying!: A writer’s review of the first five books of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (Outlander, Dragonfly In Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross)

Flashplot: Let’s make this clear from the start: these books are mammoth. Micro-summarizing them successfully is impossible. Instead I’ll merely explain the general premise and move on to the review. 

Claire Beauchamp walks though a Scottish stone circle in her own time, just after WWII, and finds herself transported to the same place only two-hundred years earlier. In a plot to keep her alive and out of the hands of a suspicious British Captain, her rescuers marry her off to a Scottish rebel Jamie Fraser. At first Claire’s biggest concern is that she is already married to a man from her own time, whom she wants desperately to return to. Soon, though, she’s fallen for her new husband and has become entangled with his complicated and dangerous past, present, and future. 

The books do some time-jumping as they follow the cast of characters across different centuries and countries. They also do some genre bending as they work in elements of romance, history, magical realism, and adventure.

As a reader: There’s a reason I find myself reviewing all five of these books at once: I read them so fast, one after the other, that I actually couldn’t tell you where one ended and the next began. The characters, plot, and setting were equally enticing to me. Claire is strong, yet not brash. Jaime is everything a girl wants in an alpha-male of a romance book—pig-headed and overbearing on the outside, while sensitive and compassionate on the inside. Did I mention he’s also hot and wearing a kilt most of the time? Yum. Add to that plots with plenty of twists, well-researched historical details, and enough humor to balance out the darker moments, and I was hooked for the long haul.

As a writer: My one complaint is that it is indeed a verra, verra long haul. (I downloaded the seven book bundle on my kindle and it comes in at 7125 pages!) Gabaldon admits she wrote book one, Outlander, as a writing exercise, with no concern over length. In the 90’s apparently publishing such a debut novel was possible; today it would be unheard of, even as good as this story was. I’m not a proponent of strict word counts just for the sake of word counts, but these books are definitely an example of works where a good editor helping to trim the fat would have benefitted everyone. Beyond book one the biggest problem for me was that there was too much rehashing of events from prior books. Different people share varying philosophies on this, but my view is, if you’re going to write a series, write a series. Assume readers have read the previous works. If they haven’t and want to know more, they’ll go back. Don’t punish loyal readers by bogging down the plot. That said, I loved the stories enough to learn to skim some—careful, of course, to stop whenever that kilt came off!

Bottom line: If you like romance with a heavy dose of action and history and you have the time or will make the time for book that’s a little wordy, and a little unique, but really entertaining, than this series is worth picking up!

July 2012 Review: Proof Flawed Can Still Be Fabulous

Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E. L. James

Since this is a three-in-one review, this one is a little longer, but since I know many of you are as curious about these books as I was, I figured no one would mind!

Flashplot: Readers of the Twilight series will see many similarities in the plot and characters of these novels since Fifty Shades was originally written as a fan fiction for Meyer’s series.  However, though James closely shadows certain Twilight aspects, the trilogy ultimately tells its own tale of forbidden love between a deeply flawed young man and a self-conscious young woman forced to come into her own in order to save her love and her lover.

That’s the story in a nutshell. Really. Okay, so the ‘forbidden' part is derived not from Christian being a sparkly deer-eating vampire, but a palm-twitching Dom with a love of BDSM, and unlike Bella, Ana isn’t faced with the decision to give up her humanity, but rather to embrace her sexuality in all its kinky glory.  Other than that, though, it’s your typical Romeo and Juliet tale.

As a reader: Like many women, I picked up the first book out of curiosity. I wanted to see if Fifty Shades was really worth the hype. Unlike some soccer moms out there, I had read romance/erotica books before, so I wasn’t expecting to be shocked or disturbed by the sex scenes. Overall, I wasn’t.  J. R. Ward had explored the BDSM angle years ago in her Black Dagger Brotherhood series.  So what it came down to was whether the characters and plot could pull me along with or without the sex scenes (preferably with). Though the flawed writing, especially in the beginning, was distracting, the answer was yes.  Like in the Twilight series, I loved watching the heroine, Ana Steele, grow from timorous to tenacious. These books allow women to reminisce about our first loves and cringe over our struggles to grow from shy teens to confident young women. I equally loved watching Christian Grey, Ana’s love interest, devolve from a rich, domineering sex-god, to a broken but healing, lovable human being. The initial fantasy of finding a rich, handsome, and dangerous lover is fun, but realizing that most of the time it really is nothing more than fantasy is comforting and more realistic.

As someone who enjoyed the Twilight series, I was a bit disappointed at first by the amount of similarities between the main characters and plots.  However, as I read further into the books, James began to divert more and more from fan fiction until what she ultimately created was her own story–a bit cliché, but still fun by its own merits. Some of my favorite bits of the books were when James was having fun with her own humor and creativity, mainly the subject lines of the emails sent between Ana and Christian, which were always either rib-cracking funny or eye-poppingly shocking.

So although the sex was great, in the end it was the characters with miles of heartbreaking backstory and those bits of creativity and humor that sucked me in and kept me up to all hours of the night.

As a writer: I’m not sure whether books like these ought to make me feel better or worse about my own writing. I felt great reading the opening chapter of the first book and recognizing that it was in some serious need of revision. It is comforting to know other new writers struggle getting their stories out of the gate. It is clear as one reads further into the book, that James was still finding the voices of her characters in those opening chapters. Though the first person narration felt stiff and the dialogue sounded forced for those first few chapters, James got into a groove relatively quickly.  Soon, Ana sounded like a realistic twenty-two year old, both in her thoughts and dialogue. Her inner monologues often rang sadly and humorously true of a twenty-two year old in the throes of love and life.

There were other flaws, too, such as overused words and phrases, which began to stand out as the series progressed. Plot development was also shaky, but this I understood as a writer. James was trying to balance the plot surrounding her characters’ personal journeys with external plots. If the two plots aren’t tightly linked to one another, as James’s weren’t, one can climax at an odd time within the arch of the book.

So why would all these flaws make me feel worse as a writer? Well, because my own books share many of them, but they aren’t likely to go viral like Fifty Shades any time soon.

Bottom line: If you’re an adult who liked the Twilight series and are comfortable with some untraditional sex scenes, you’re likely to get sucked into this series, so go ahead and purchase the entire trilogy. You’ll save some cash, and trust me, you won’t want to stop reading long enough to drive to the nearest store.