“Although at first glance, this is exactly my type of book - historical fiction with a love story attached to it. However, I would not recommend this because:
1) This is an 'I' book. It is told from Claire Randall's perspective. I really prefer 3rd person POV.
2) At 863 pages, it is needlessly long. In my opinion, Gabaldon has a tendency to over describe things. She is halfway towards overtelling, but I think she definitely over describes stuff. Does it really make any difference if she had omitted the countless insignificant patients that Claire treated? A paragraph would have been sufficient, I think, or maybe even a page, to establish her as a really kind-hearted person, but a few chapters?
3) Character development is a bit weird.
As the story progresses, we see the gentle nurse killing a few people. While it is understandable that she should need to protect herself and Jamie, it is her lack of regret about it that I found unsettling. She who used to preserve life turns into a desperate person who lives by the rule of kill or be killed. This I find realistic, had we been in her situation we would probably resort to that, but it is the coolness and the calmness that shocked me. For all her over describing, Gabaldon does not even show how killing affects Claire.
In contrast, Jamie's character, as the buff warrior who was Claire's saviour, gets reduced to a whimpering, pathetic figure towards the end of the novel. In some novels, enduring such an ordeal would make the hero more appealing, but in Cross Stitch, the ordeal leaves the hero a broken man, literally and figuratively. It is hard to sustain any enthusiasm for reading the last pages of the novel when the characters themselves seem to have given up.
4) The last few chapters of the book preaches Christian doctrine a little bit too heavily for my taste as a non-Christian.
5) The homosexual antagonist Randall practices some very disturbingly kinky sex. Even more disturbing the fact that Jamie's sister manages to escape rape when he himself doesn't.
6) The heroine fails, in my opinion, to convince Jamie that she is his equal. There is a considerable mention of flogging in the novel, and at one point Jamie is forced to flog Claire. Claire not only fails to get herself out of the predicament; she later starts to believe that Jamie had done the right thing. It seems to me that unlike other strong heroine, Claire loses herself as she falls in love.
7) The main plot - that of the price on Jamie's head - is a tad too trivial and too simplistic.”
Ms_JO wrote this review Thursday, November 19 2009.
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