Book #2 is Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

I hadn't been... actively avoiding this series, but I also hadn't gone after it either. I knew a lot of people who adored it and recommended it, and it's not like I haven't read a romance novel or two, so I'm not sure what the reticence was...

Oh wait, it was the whole time travel thing.

I hate time travel. Hate it. Fortunately here, Gabaldon has it happen (due to magical, druid type means) and then pretty much dismisses it. I'm pretty much ok with that.

Overall, this book left me a little conflicted. A 'modern' (from 1945) woman in mid-1700s Scotland definitely has a different outlook on life, and so in someways, Claire wasn't a standard damsel in distress, she was tough and resourceful and didn't take shit from male dominated society...

Except she did.

She ended up in situations where she constantly needed to be rescued. Which is fine the first couple of times, not fine after it kept happening to the point of repetition. She was forced into a marriage. The saving grace here is that the main male character, Jamie (whoo... took three tries to not type that as 'Jaime') was also forced into the marriage. Jamie thrashes her at one point for disobeying his orders, and the whole thing just becomes annoying because it's kinda just dismissed later. If they had enjoyed it as play, then I would've had no problem with it, but as it was, it was portrayed as Claire being VERY against it, Jamie seeing it as his husbandly duty, but... I don't know, it just didn't work because Gabaldon didn't really commit one way or another. To me, it would've been the perfect catalyst for Claire to go home, realize she did love Jamie (still not certain why she did love him other than he kept rescuing her and they had great sex) and return again to this life that she had chosen under careful consideration and not just five minutes of debate before deciding NOT to return at all.

Maybe that's what really bugged me about this, is that Claire didn't return to her own time. I think I needed that, for her to put to rest her first marriage, have some closure there and then return to Jamie. We didn't need a big confrontation scene with her first husband, but perhaps to see that he had moved on with his life and so case closed.

The amount of violence and threatened sexual violence didn't bug me, comes with the historical territory really. The fact that the worst sexual violence happened to the male character was a bit of an interesting twist, but once again, I didn't like that the main bad guy ,Randall, was such an overdone caricature, AND once again, Claire and Jamie were robbed of any real closure with him as he died in a completely ridiculous manner. And what we're left to take away from it all, that since dude died before he had children (so basically the history Claire knew has been changed), Claire's modern husband might not be born now, so hey... no worries on that whole, weird bigamy thing that Claire's got going on. Perfect!

Sigh. There are interesting ideas in this book, and not bad characters, but it just never really gets anywhere for me.