“An Echo in the Bone is the seventh book in the popular Outlander saga. By this time in the series, Jamie and Claire Fraser are in their 50's and early 60's - and still as much in love as they ever were. (May I say how refreshing it is to read about an older couple in love and - dare I say it? - still enjoying an active sex life?) The Outlander series is a blend of adventure, historical fiction, romance and time travel. I think that in Echo there is more historical fiction than anything else, but plenty of the other three also. Echo is set in America and Scotland from 1776-1778, so the historical setting in this case is the Revolutionary War - one of my favorite time periods. And there are major characters on both the American and the Britsh sides, so we get to view the war from both sides. I did a fair amount of Googling about the battles of the Revolutionary War while I was reading this book. It helped that I had read 1776 by McCullough several years ago.
In the first few books in the series (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber), the story was told in first-person by Claire. And even though Claire and Jamie's story will always be the main theme of these books, by now there are several other major characters and storylines. So in addition to Claire's narrative in this book, we also have three other main POV's (points of view): young Ian's, Roger and Brianna's family, and Lord John and William (the British contingent). I have read some comments that other readers thought there was too many changes in the POV's, but I had absolutely no problem and thought that those other stories needed to be told.
My only critique is that this book ends with a big cliff-hanger. Several cliff-hangers in fact. The last 40-50 pages of the book are a roller-coaster ride and then...Boom! (That's a figurative boom, not a literal one). I really wish that Gabaldon had wrapped up a few more things and fleshed out those last few pages a little more. I attended a Gabaldon book signing last week, and she said that she hasn't even started to write the next book, which means that I'm probably going to have to wait at least three years to find out what happens to my favorite characters. Argghhhhhhh!
But even having said that, this book still gets a 4.5* rating from me. There simply is no other series (or even a single book) that has ever "pulled me down the rabbit hole" like the Outlander books do - and this book was no exception. It's now two days after I finished Echo, and I'm still suffering from an Outlander hangover and unable to start any other book. I guess that the good thing about a three year wait is that it will give me plenty of time to re-read the entire series again before the next book comes out. Given the fact that they are all big books (700 to 1000 pages), I'll need the entire three years LOL.
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