A Romance Lover’s Guide to Outlander

(Romance Audiobook Lovers that is)

First, about Outlander and the Outlander series: not technically romance. Author Diana Gabaldon will be first in line to tell you this. Loudly and adamantly.

But Outlander isn’t neatly categorized as one genre – there’s time travel (paranormal/sci-fi), suspense, murder, mystery, historical fact and fiction as well as the overall arc of Jamie-and-Claire which satisfies many a diehard romance junkie. There are all the catnip/hot button issues you can imagine: kids, animals, besotted heroes in kilts, rape, adultery, pirates and swashbuckling adventures, drinking and drugs and kidnapping and war. There are devastating heartbreaks and endless, unconditional love that literally span hundreds of years. There’s even a ripped bodice or two along the way. And now there are eight Big Books/Long Audiobooks of all this to indulge your every Outlander desire.

Those of us who are already fans (I’ve been tagging my social media posts #outlandernerd) are Beyond Excited <vbg> that, in addition to reading and listening to Outlander, US TV network STARZ is releasing Outlander a STARZ Original Series, with 16 episodes already in the can!  Yeah, ok, there’s a small but annoying vocal minority with quibbles like “that’s not how I see Jamie” and “Catriona’s eyes are BLUE and Claire’s are WHISKEY COLORED!” – but the rest of us are drooling at the trailers of the incredible cast and fabulous set, planning Outlander watching parties and learning Gaelic with Adhamh O Broin (experience Jamie saying Sassenach here!)

 

 

For the uninitiated, however, I’ve put together a little Guide to Outlander, with emphasis on the audio version narrated by the incredible Davina Porter, who will always be Jamie in my head – sorry, Sam!

 

Outlander

In Which We Meet Claire and Frank… and [dreamy sigh] Jamie … and have a lot of adventures

I bought Outlander after finishing Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, and was in need of another time travel fix – bad*. I wandered the book store aisles, reading the backs of covers until I found it. Unfortunately – or maybe fortunately? – there was a big price sticker across the blurb, so I missed the part about Jamie, and was gobsmacked when Claire had to marry him!! Wait – backup – the book opens with Claire Randall on a second honeymoon with her wonderful husband Frank in 1946 Scotland. She goes searching for plants near a Stonehenge-like structure, touches it and – cue sci-fi time travel music here – wakes up in pre-Culloden Scotland.

Gabaldon just does it right – she builds the tension and all the pieces fall into place. After all, a story about a Wall Street banker in 2014 waking up in 18th c Scotland would have a very, very different feel than a 1946 WWII nurse, who could certainly take better care of herself in 1743. I’ve read the book in print at least three times, and following the suggestion from a poster on Gabaldon’s Compuserve list that listening to it would bring even more depth and understanding, opened my Audible account with this as my first, free audiobook (or was it three books for $7 each?). That poster deserves a dinner with Sam Heughan**, because she was spot on. Even after reading the book several times, hearing Davina Porter read it opened up entire worlds and plot lines I wasn’t even aware of, in addition to giving Jamie a wonderful, sexy Scottish voice I had not heard in my mind when reading. If you skim – and face it, you do – switching to audio format will be like reading a completely different, longer, more complete book. With accents.

*The Time Traveler’s Wife is excellent – and romantic – but it’s not romance, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s also wonderful in audio, using a male narrator for the male first person POV (Henry) and female for Clare (coincidence).

**Sam Heughan is the actor playing Jamie in the STARZ TV series. [big, dreamy sigh]

You could stop at Outlander, having read a wonderful, romantic time travel, and feel content. HAH just kidding, because after you finish Outlander, you will be BEGGING FOR MORE:

  

Dragonfly in Amber

In Which Claire Finds Out [major spoiler – but you’ll be thrilled to know] Jamie Did Not Die at Culloden

Oh wait, that is a spoiler, because when you start DIA you don’t know Jamie is supposed to die at Culloden. Oops. It opens in the 20th century, with Claire and her 20-year-old daughter Brianna (and you think you know who the father is, right??) going to Scotland to see what happened to the Fraser clan after Culloden. And then you touch the stones and are hurtled back in time to find out why she wants to know…

This is where you meet Roger Mac, a young, bright professor at Oxford who helps Claire research the fates of the Clan Fraser. Okay, no more spoilers yet – you’ll get plenty if you read the rest of this article! But it’s hard to keep from telling you Things You Don’t Know Until You Read:

 

Voyager

In Which Claire and Jamie are Finally [sorry, spoiler] Reunited

I’m telling you – that reunion scene should get an award for the most-read-over-and-over-again scene of any book anywhere. Or maybe it’s just me – Gabaldon is a master at description that puts you right there, in the scene, feeling the emotions of every character, and when Jamie slumps down onto the floor with Claire – ok, just go get the audiobook AND the ebook and let yourself be immersed in all things Outlander!

In DIA, we learn “the rest of the story” that picks up at the end of Outlander in 18th c Scotland, and follows Jamie and Claire on their road to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie so that the Culloden slaughter does not take place. Once it becomes clear that time travelers cannot stop history [see The Outlandish Companion for more of Gabaldon’s time travel theory], they do what they can to at least stop the Frasers from becoming victims. Claire, pregnant with Brianna, leaves Jamie to his inevitable destiny so that she can save their child, and hurtles back to the future. In Voyager, we all slip through the stones again and after the most joyful reunion in fiction, take up adventuring in A Big Way. I am telling you, that Claire is an adventure magnet – not a page goes by that we aren’t holding on to our seats, experiencing 18th c ship travel, pirates, swashbuckling, Caribbean islands – and not on vacay! A hurricane washes them up on the shores of the New World, on the eve of independence. Whew. But don’t get complacent because you’re about to hear:

 

Drums of Autumn

In Which Jamie and Claire Become Southerners in North Carolina

At this point, Jamie and Claire FINALLY get to have something resembling a regular life, if you consider 1766 North Carolina mountain living regular. It’s a relief for fans, really, for things to slow down – no more life threatening escapades, right? Right? Hah! Diana Gabaldon doesn’t know the meaning of slowing down! [Note: except in The Fiery Cross, which is next.] When Brianna – in the 20th century – finds a newsclipping indicating her parents die in a fire, she finds she has the time travel gene [or whatever] and hurtles back in time to warn them.

Let me just interject that Davina Porter is still the narrator, and she still is The Voice of Outlander in every possible way, with the slight exception that her modern American accents are, shall we say, not as convincing but there are not too many of them, so it’s ok. Except for Bree, who really should sound more American since she grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Just saying. Also – and now I cannot remember which books – there are discreet coughs and other background noises in two of the audiobooks, which you only hear if you are using really good earbuds. If you’re listening in the car, you probably won’t notice it over the car engine noise.

 

The Fiery Cross

In Which We Learn That Gabaldon Can Describe One Day in Several Hundred Pages

This is the book that I would guess lost the most followers – once you’ve invested yourself so much in the series, it’s hard to stop, but many people found this one too slow. I was not at all put off by the One Long Day – it was brilliant, fascinating, and while it crept along at a snail’s pace reading-wise, it was filled with interesting stories and Day-in-the-Life kinds of details. They are still in North Carolina, and there’s a lot of British-vs-the-Colonies antagonism building. Claire is in a unique position to know how that is going to turn out, and convinces Jamie it’s ok to join the rebels, which he does reluctantly. After all, he’s had a long, long history of being on the side that didn’t win, and he’s suffered mightily through four books already because of it. Plus there’s some Roger and Brianna stuff here that is pretty awful, and our boy, young Ian – who has been involved laterally for a couple of books – makes a major life shift.

 

A Breath of Snow and Ashes

In Which It Becomes Clear The Revolution is Begun and a Lot More Important Characters are Included

By now, we have expanded from Jamie and Claire to Jamie and Claire and Brianna and Roger and Fergus and Marsali and Ian and… The Clan is now into its third generation, with Roger and Brianna’s children Jem and Mandy. Each of these characters have important story lines to follow, but it’s still only 67% the length of The Fiery Cross. The whole lot of them is still in North Carolina, living the good life in the just-pre-Revolutionary-War-era. But there are adventures – many of them gut-wrenching – still to be had. Jamie is once again tapped to lead men – for the Loyalists, and has to make A Decision. Roger has decided his calling is to preach. Claire is quite the conjure-woman-physician, making ether and early penicillin. Ian comes back from his Indian life, changed. Bree is coming to terms with how to live in the 18th century. But when her daughter Mandy is born with a heart defect, she faces a life-or-death choice, and once again Gabaldon rips out your heart with mere words. It’s addictive, I tell you, and once you’ve come this far, you are so invested you calendar-watch for the next book, which is:

 

An Echo in the Bone

In Which There Are an Incredible Number of Cliffhangers

Yep, Gabaldon always leaves a few plots hanging, but in Echo you could hear the squeaks of fans worldwide as they finished the book – OMG WHAT HAPPENED TO

? We continue to follow Jamie and Claire – and they continue to show us that love and sex in your later years can be just as exciting as the 20s and 30s – but the cast of characters has multiplied enough that we are now following with great interest all of the various clan members and their buds/nemeses/neighbors. Lord John and his step-son William have been featured as British officers, and I’ll just throw a bone to you – William is more closely related to Jamie than John, but doesn’t know it. There’s a trip to Scotland – poor Jamie, always gets so sea sick! and a trip back that ends in disaster. Bree and Roger buy Lallybroch in the 1970s and discover a sort of time-traveler’s-blog-thing (a trunk of letters).

I keep bringing up Davina Porter – the woman is an incredible narrator! Early on in the publishing of the original books, Before iPods and Audible, authors – including Gabaldon – didn’t know nothin’ about no audiobook rights. In fact, there are a lot of rights involved in publishing, with movies and such, that authors don’t always get many options for. The original books were recorded both as unabridged and as abridged. Unfortunately, the rights for the abridged had some component that made it impossible for retailers to sell the unabridged at the same time for 10 years after publication. That meant that early on, you could get Outlander and then later DIA, at Audible or from other retailers, but later titles were not [yet] available direct to the consumer. As time marched on, and technology changed and we all started jumping on the download-audiobook bandwagon, it was frustrating that you could get the abridged versions (WHAT?? GABALDON IN 3 HOURS?) but not unabridged. That issue has finally been resolved by time – the options ran out and were not renewed and Gabaldon no longer has that clause in her contract! I read the first five books in print before getting the audiobooks, but books 6-8 I went straight to audio. I admit, for MOBY I also purchased the Kindle ebook and did some searches in it while listening, since it’s difficult to locate details in audio.

 

Written in My Own Heart’s Blood– aka MOBY

In Which All the Cliffhangers Are Resolved and We Learn This is Not the Last Book

I wrote a review of MOBY that doesn’t contain much of a plot summary, but at this point I encourage the gentle reader to listen to Davina Porter read Diana Gabaldon for herself. Although I found myself having a quibble or two – including the pronunciation of the word Samhain – I was once again entranced, and the ending alone was worth the price of the Audible credit.

 

 

Get busy – it’s 792 hours and counting to Outlander TV.

Melinda