Both characters have grown older now, Claire is 48 (but looking and feeling quite young) and Jamie is 44. They have both been through quite a lot (especially Jamie), they have matured and changed. I liked the way Gabaldon accentuated the fact that, even though they were still very much in love, at first they did not actually know each other (a normal thing due to the twenty years that have gone by) and had to sort of reacquaint with each other all over again. I admire very much Gabaldon’s skill to bring her characters to life, to make the reader feel like they are some close friends (I myself had a moment, after few hours’ reading, when I closed the book and then for a short second felt amazed that Jamie was left there, that he wasn’t actually alive but only the figment of someone’s imagination).

To be honest I did wonder why does the author insist on making Jamie an outlaw. You’d think that after seven years in a cave and quite a few in prison he’ll be happy to be forgiven and go live quietly with his folks. But no, he just had to take up smuggling, in Edinburgh no less. There is something that “city Jamie” is missing (as compared to the “non city Jamie”), I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it makes him a bit less enjoyable – I felt that in the second book too. We get to see a third Jamie in this book, the “sea Jamie”, as about half of the pages are spent sailing from one island in the West Indies to another. I like this Jamie very well, as much as I ever liked him when not living in a city.

We get to meet Geilis all over again, a very happy event for me as I was a bit bothered by a little discordance in the past two books: when Claire goes through the stones she ends up in the same spot about 200 years earlier or later, sequentially. The number of years she spends on one side or another is the same on both sides (for example she spends almost three years with Jamie and comes back after almost three years from the moment she disappeared). Geilis was another matter as she left twenty years after Claire and ended up five years earlier, which didn’t quite fit with the theory. Luckily we meet her again and she is able to explain that :)

I also find interesting the way Claire’s “lives” seem to keep “touching” each other. For example in this book in 1968 she has one doctor friend in America, a black man named Joe Abernathy. On her last visit to his office he shows her a newly found skeleton from a cave in the Caribbean, which they both examine and take turns in guessing what might have happened to her (they identify her as being a white woman that has been killed with a dull blade about two hundred years ago). Back in 1765 not only she meets with a strange black man which sort of reminded her of Joe (and also was a slave to a woman named Abernathy, making him very probably to be Joe’s grand-grand-grandfather) but she is also involved in killing a white woman, in a cave in the Caribbean, with a sort of stone axe, only later realizing the coincidence.

What I liked most:I did like the majority of the book, especially after they left the city :P However my very favorite moment couldn’t be any other than the moment Claire is reunited with Jamie. I find it very well written (and am amused by the fact that Jamie actually fainted) because they are both happy to see each other but also wary, each of them not knowing in what way the person in front of them changed in the last twenty years.

What I liked least: The fact that Jamie has married Laoghaire! I was so upset because of that (still am). I do understand his feelings, his fear of loneliness, his need of someone in his life and in his bed, but married? Jamie and Claire seemed to place very much importance on their wedding vows and the thought of his making the same vows to another… well it ain’t pretty. Especially as that another was Laoghaire! (I bet these were exactly the kind of feelings the author wanted the readers to feel, I see the manipulation but I still can’t help being annoyed and disappointed and a plethora of other things – but if I am honest I do admit that’s why I love these books so much, because of the strong feelings they make me have :) )

Recommend it? Absolutely, but only after reading the first two books. While this is quite a good read in itself it has a lot more depth and the characters are a lot easier to understand if knowing the prequels.

This book is a sequel to:
Outlander
Dragonfly in Amber

This book is followed by:
Drums of Autumn
The Fiery Cross
A Breath of Snow and Ashes

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