Genre: Historical, Romance, Sci-Fi
Rating: B+
The sequel to Outlander, A Dragonfly in Amber is a bit more jumpy
than its predecessor – particularly in the start and finish. Rather than being a straight continuation of
the story where it left off, Dragonfly
jumps to the future – thus establishing that Claire both survives the rising
and returns to the future, while leaving the how, why, and (most importantly)
what happens to Jamie left hanging. I
think a big part of the reason why Dragonfly
isn’t as strong as Outlander is
because of this immediate jump to the ‘future’; it’s a bit disjaring (which is
okay, given the nature of the series), but more significantly it kind of
interrupts the story. Outlander is one concise story, about a
woman out of time, with the reader experiencing things as she’s experiencing
them (despite the novel being written in the past tense). By starting Dragonfly twenty (and 203) years after the events of Outlander Gabaldon is establishing
Claire as this older, wiser woman now telling a story to her daughter – and,
frankly, some of the story that she tells the readers is stuff that I would
hope she isn’t also telling Brianna. The
story that Claire tells Brianna and Roger is one that picks up very roughly
where Outlander ends and brings our
English woman and Scotsman into France on the eve of the 1745 Rising. Knowing
what they know about the future, Claire and Jamie are faced with a problem: can
they use what they know to change the future and if so, should they be trying
to prevent the Rising or work to make it successful?
I really like the way this book ends, even if I wasn’t a big fan of the
way in which it was started. Honestly, I
love the idea of a narrator telling us a story from a much older perspective,
as they look back on their life. It’s
actually a big part of why I enjoy Bernard Cornwell's The
Warlord Chronicles and The Saxon Stories. As I
said, the problem that I had with the way Dragonfly
did this was that it interrupted the overall narration of the story. I think I would have rather seen the jump
forward twenty years to a Claire telling the story to Brianna and Roger at the
end; have her in the present with her daughter be the big reveal at the end instead
of the shock at the start. But that’s
all coulda, woulda, shoulda, and while I’m not a big fan of how Gabaldon did
this overall I do have to admit it works.
That being said, what I don’t think worked as well was the period of
the novel where our heroes are in France.
While I loved the characters that are introduced here – especially Master
Raymond – and would love to see some of them remerge in later books, the
overall story here in itself was a bit on the dull side. The charm of Outlander was its setting, but the bulk of Dragonfly is really removed from this setting. Claire was a fish out of water to begin with,
but while in France it’s more like she’s… I donno… a whale out of water. She’s able to survive, but not for long –
likewise with my attention span.
One of the things that I do love, however, is the introduction of Roger as a narrator, even if it is in the third person. I really like the way Roger sees things. Like myself he’s a historian who’s intrigued by a good tale, and it’s made very clear very quickly that the only way Claire is able to move forward and Brianna is able to accept the truth is through Roger. The part of me that enjoys a good mind fuck in literature almost thinks that it’d be fun if Claire was revealed to have been a complete nutjob who dreamed her time in the eighteenth century, but I realize that’s not going to happen – there’s too much pseudo-science to these books to make them just a mind fuck.
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