An Echo in the Bone: Outlander Novel 7

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What’s up w/ Jamie’s mild reaction when Lord John fessed up that he had carnal knowledge of Claire ? Oh wait, I forgot, this book only serves as a stepping stone for the next installment Now Brianna has made a disturbing discovery that sends her to the stone circle and a terrifying leap into the unknown. In search of her mother and the father she has never met, she is risking her own future to try to change history…and to save their lives. But as Brianna plunges into an uncharted wilderness, a heartbreaking encounter may strand her forever in the past…or root her in the place she should be, where her heart and soul belong….” Dennis Scott wrote in Jamaica’s post-independence period. He had a distinguished career as a poet, playwright, actor (he was Lester Tibideaux in the Cosby Show), as a dancer in the Jamaican National Dance Theatre, as Editor of Caribbean Quarterly and as the Director of the Jamaica School of Drama,and visiting Associate Professor of Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. Scott was a polymath. Thank you for posting this! I didn't know how to review this myself (so I didn't!) because I'm so emotionally attached to the series, but if I had posted a full review, this is how I would have liked it to look! :) I have to say, Diana, that I had a little trouble keeping all the characters and subplots and relationships --- and dates! --- straight. There are complications and contradictions galore: A young English officer who is actually Jamie’s son and doesn’t know it. An English lord and secret agent who is in love with Jamie, but who at one point marries Claire. A man showing up in the 20th century who turns out to be Roger’s grandfather. (Thanks to your rich fan culture; I accessed an enlightening online timeline: http://web.me.com/mawaltz/Tursachan/timeline.pdf. I recommend it.)

There are many familiar pleasures in AN ECHO IN THE BONE. I was delighted to follow Claire’s further medical adventures (trained as a surgeon on her return visit to the 20th century, she reinvents ether, struggles against chauvinistic doctors, and blithely amputates and acupunctures her way through a shifting landscape of war and illness); hear the music of Gaelic again (usually I hate it when foreign phrases are thrown into English-language writing, but in your books it works); and once more admire the forcefulness and fearlessness of Claire and her daughter --- who, as always in your books, leave a long trail of stunned and flummoxed males in their wake. Diana's books are always lengthy and so vividly detailed, her characters are three dimensional because she gives such lavish and loving attention introducing them to you....Echo is a let down as she spent more time on the battles that she did on the people.Again, I’m with SonomaLass, DG can take me whereever and I’ll happily go along for the ride so long as Jamie’s there!

I felt more unhappy about the Brianna/Roger storyline to be honest – when I first finished the book I’d forgotten all about it and suddenly realised there’s this massive cliffhanger. I don’t want Roger and Brianna to be apart from each other!! In her now classic novel Outlander,Diana Gabaldon told the story of Claire Randall, an English ex-combat nurse who walks through a stone circle in the Scottish Highlands in 1946, and disappears . . . into 1743. The story unfolded from there in seven bestselling novels, and CNN has called it “a grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].” Now the story continues in Written in My Own Heart’s Blood. It’s not really a spoiler because he’s long been a widower. He was married to the sister of Geneva (I forget the sister’s name – Isabel, maybe?); Geneva was the spoiled young woman who basically forced Jamie to sleep with her when he was a groom (after he was released from prison after Culloden). Because Geneva died in childbirth, the child (supposedly the issue of Geneva’s elderly husband but really Jamie’s) was raised by Isobel, and then by Isobel and John when they married. Yeah, ITA. I mean, I love them as a couple (better than I like Claire on her own), but even this book probably had one or two more love scenes between them than I needed. I love seeing what Gabaldon is doing with new characters, and getting more in depth characterizations of existing characters. I don’t mind the slow pace at all (though I was gonna be pissed if they never got to Scotland in this book).As in many of your Outlander books, there are also sequences that take place in (more or less) modern times. Jamie and Claire’s daughter, Brianna --- born, raised and educated as an engineer in the 20th century, but later an “émigré” to the 1700s --- and Roger Wakefield, her historian husband, also a time-traveler, have two kids born in the 18th century. As AN ECHO IN THE BONE opens, the family has leap-frogged a few centuries, to Scotland in 1980, to get medical help for their daughter. They move into the ancestral Fraser home in Lallybroch, and here they find letters from Jamie and Claire, written and left for them during the Frasers’ own visit to Scotland in 1777-78. (Am I explaining this well enough? Would you like to take over?) The best way I can put it is that the Frasers have created a sort of inter-century mailbox.