Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1994
Well, people, she's done it: Gabaldon has sucked me in entirely.
That's right: the Outlander series has completely engrossed me, and I will not rest until I've read all six books. Well, I mean, I'll rest. But I'll be all jittery until the next two titles make it (via interlibrary loan) to my local library.
Voyager succeeds in a way that Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber didn't -- couldn't, maybe -- because our protagonists have grown up, and the clichéd plot arc of a typical romantic novel (forced marriage, surprise love, blessed pregnancy) has to go out the window. Voyager is the first volume in this series that is really surprising to the reader, and it's this quality that elevates it above its predecessors.
Not that it doesn't have the same glaring flaws of the first two: purple prose, subplots that anyone with three-tenths of a brain could predict, disproportionate length. The biggest problem I had with it, though, was that Voyager has a serious case of Small World Syndrome. Surely you've encountered this in other books: protagonists whose adventurings span great distances inevitably run into the same people over and over again, or meet new people who are inextricably linked to people they already know. It's a cheap way of adding drama, and I wish Gabaldon would be a little more realistic about the chances of running into the very same guy who blah blah blah et cetera.
Yet for all its flaws, Voyager is a great read. Not a great book, mind you, but definitely a great read.
Recommended? It's the best fluff I've had in years.
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