Just Finished Reading Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

A few weeks ago I was browsing the shelves at my local Books-a-Million when, in the General Fiction section, I discovered several beautiful-looking books by Diana Gabaldon: the Outlander series.  I picked up the 1991 title novel in this eight-part series and stood there reading through the first chapter.  Very well written with compelling characters and told from the point of view of Claire Randall, the protagonist, I decided to take on the book and the greater series.  Well, I just finished reading Outlander and naturally have a few reactions...

Claire Randall is a British nurse who has just returned from duty in 1945 at the close of World War II.  She and her recently married husband Frank had been separated due to the war...she was stationed at medical facilities in France tending to wounded soldiers.  But now they are reunited and decide to spend a second honeymoon in Inverness, Scotland, where Frank, a professor of history, wants to do research on his family tree.  They discover a distant ancestor, John Randall, who was an English army captain stationed in Scotland in the 1740s...which incidentally was also the time of the Scottish uprising against English rule and the brutal war which took place there.  It's all interesting family history to Claire, but nothing more...until while collecting flowers around a group of ancient standing stones, she is suddenly transported back to that exact time.  The adventure ensues as Claire has to come to grips with the fact that she is a stranger in time...and suspicious to all in this polarized era of nationalism and Scottish clan factionalism.  That's about all I can reveal except to say that Outlander isn't just historical fiction and adventure crossed with a dab of science fiction and fantasy: a great part of the narrative reads like a romance novel...y'know, lurid, explicit scenes and all.  Which is fine if you're into that sort of thing, but I found it a bit tedious to get through...

I don't know what to expect for the rest of the series, which I'm planning to resume in the near future, but I do know that Gabaldon did a masterful job of presenting what must have been a very difficult task: going back 250 years in time to a different culture and society and making me, the reader, feel that I was back then and there as well.  Her characters are very believable and she delves deeply into their various personalities and backgrounds.  Besides Claire, the second most important character is a young Scotsman named Jamie Fraser, who is wanted by the English for various crimes and who especially arouses the wrath...among other things...of Captain Randall, who turns out to be a sadistic villain.  Well, here I go revealing more than I intended...I think I'll just let it go at that and move on to reading the next book in the series, titled Dragonfly in Amber.  By the way, I read that Starz has begun a series based on Outlander...but I'm not watching it until I finish reading the rest of the book series.  After all, I've seen how the Sy Fy Channel completely mutilated Lev Grossman's fantastic The Magicians series with their so-called "adaptation"...