50 Books: Dragonfly in Amber
Title/Author: Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
Page Count/Book Type: 743
Genre: Historical Fiction/Time Travel/Romance
Back of the Book: For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland's majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones...about a love that transcends the boundaries of time...and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his...
Now, a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire's spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart...in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising....and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves...
Page One: Because this is a series, and I don't want to spoil anything, I'm not going to add the first page from the rest of these. The author uses time skips and date changes so it'd be full of spoilers.
I have three things to say about this series: first, the back of the books are written so terribly that I would never pick them up, and are a terrible testament to how decent the plot of the story actually is. Second, I absolutely cannot stand her main character, Claire, who is the equivilant of Kate from LOST. Everyone loves her, she is always the central point of every plot, but her personality is stiff and boring at times, and sometimes she can just be a giant bitch. Third, I absolutely adore her side characters. They don't get alot of screen time just for the sheer amount of them that there are, but I don't think there's a single one who I wouldn't read a book entirely dedicated about them.
I didn't think I would enjoy the twenty year time skip as much, because the lead characters go from being 24 and 28 to being 44 and 48, which is a little less interesting to me. (Mostly because I'm mature and in my mind I think "ew, old people having sex..." but what can you do. I think it worked wonderfully for the story, because it filled in a lot of what happened that, quite honestly, would have been painfully boring to read.
Granted, Dragonfly in Amber was the slowest read out of the three I have read from this series, but it's enjoyable. I like how Diana Gabaldon separates her book into chapters, and then uses plenty of line breaks in the chapters, so I feel like I can read an episode or two, set it down, and come back to it if I don't have time enough to finish the entire thing.