The Last Word

Somewhere in Time

The popular TV series, Outlander, was released on the network Starz a short time before I wrote the following review about Diana Gabaldon’s novel by the same name. I followed the series eagerly and was pleasantly surprised by its high-quality first season. The series, starring the well-cast Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser and Caitriona Balfe as Claire Randall, has gone beyond the three books I reviewed below in 2015 by continuing to adapt her subsequent novels about the pair, their friends, and relations. I highly recommend taking some time to binge the books before binging the series, but either method of story-telling will make fans of time-travel historical romance happy this summer. These are not Harlequin novels. They have much to offer strong, independent women and the men who love them.

From the Vault:

In 1980, the movie Somewhere in Time became one of the classic romantic films of its era, with a timeless theme and gorgeous musical score. Christopher Reeve plays a young Chicago playwright intrigued by an elegant older lady who comes up to him at a party, asking him to return in time to her. Upon finding pictures of her as a beautiful young woman at a hotel in Michigan, he finds a way to go back in time to meet her, played by Jane Seymour, in 1912. Author Diana Gabaldon uses a different technique with her first historical novel, Outlander, and the many sequels she has written to continue the adventures of her main characters, Claire and Jamie. They also meet, as if by fate, somewhere in time. She expands on this idea in multifaceted ways with these sequels, using it to create a series worth any reader’s time.

While Gabaldon’s atmosphere and methods are not the full-blown romance of the aforementioned film, she is successful in creating a historical romance that is down-to-earth, funny, lovely, and at times poetic. Some may call these books fantasy, but they are definitely not aimed at a hardcore fantasy market. Thoroughly enjoyable, this historical fiction suspends disbelief and whisks readers away from mundane existence while helping them feel they know these people, or would even like them as friends.

Claire Beauchamp Randall is a practical former nurse back from France after World War II, having recently rejoined her husband, Frank, an historian who worked for the British spy agency MI6 during the war and has taken up an appointment at Oxford. In Scotland on a working holiday, she collects botanical specimens while her husband researches his six-times greatgrandfather, a British officer in charge of keeping savage Scottish clans in line. While on a trip collecting herbs that heal near a Neolithic circle of stones reminiscent of Stonehenge, she accidentally leans upon a tall stone, only to find herself whirled two centuries into the past, from 1946 to a small battle in 1743 in the Scottish Highlands.

As if this turn of events is not sufficiently bizarre, she quickly encounters a man who looks like her husband, the English dragoon Jonathan Randall, his ancestor. Quickly kidnapped from him by a band of Scottish cattle rustlers, Claire’s intelligence, natural courage and presence of mind lead her to create a temporary story that will help her pass in this strange society as a type of healer. In the process, she helps heal Jamie Fraser, a tall young redheaded warrior who is loathe to reveal his true identity to her and even others at the Scottish castle of the MacKenzie clan, since he is suspected of murder. All the while she tries to defray suspicions that she is either an English or French spy while taking stock of her surroundings and trying to get back to the standing stones that brought her to the eighteenth century.

Gabaldon is a wonderful natural storyteller, who indulges in a richness of detail that seams together historical, anthropological, medicinal,