Review: Virgins - Diana Gabaldon

FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE JAMIE MET CLAIRE IN THIS BRILLIANT NEW OUTLANDER SHORT STORY.

1740: Young Jamie Fraser has left Scotland and, with his best friend Ian Murray, is running with a band of mercenaries in France.

Both men have good reason not to go back to their homeland: both are nursing wounds, and despite their best efforts to remedy the situation, both are still virgins.

So when a Jewish doctor hires them to escort his granddaughter to Paris, they readily agree. Both men are instantly drawn to the beautiful young lady.

What neither know is that their lives and their friendships are about to become infinitely more complicated - and a lot more dangerous ...

Outlander Series:
Virgins (Prequel Novella)
Outlander (Originally published in the UK as Cross Stitch)
Dragonfly in Amber
Voyager
Drums of Autumn
The Fiery Cross
A Breath of Snow and Ashes
An Echo in the Bone
Written in my Own Heart's Blood
Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone (Release date to be confirmed)

Visit Diana Gabaldon's website for more information

Review:
Virgins is only a short novella so I'm going to keep my review pretty short too. Set before Jamie and Claire meet this story sees Jamie travel to France to meet up with his best friend Ian. Jamie is recovering from serious injuries and can't return home for his own safety so he joins the mercenary band that Ian has been working alongside.

I don't really want to say much more than that so you'll just have to read the story for yourself if you're interested. I did really like the friendship between Jamie and Ian so it was nice to see how supportive the two are of each other but I wasn't particularly interested in the story and didn't really think it added much to the series as a whole.

I've only read the first book in the series but I'm already leery of the amount of attempted rapes (& actual rapes!) that have already occurred and friends have warned me it only gets worse as the series continues so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that there was a rape scene and at least one attempted rape in a story that's less than 100 pages long. I get that rape would have been a huge threat to women back then (it still is now after all!) but I honestly think there is too much of it included in this series and I would enjoy the books so so much more if that was dialled back a bit. Oh well, I guess we'll just have to see how I get on with the second full length book, Dragonfly in Amber, which I'm hoping to read sometime soon.

Source: Purchased

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Hardback / Kindle:

Review: Outlander - Diana Gabaldon

THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE BESTSELLING OUTLANDER SERIES. As seen on Amazon Prime TV.

What if your future was the past?

1946, and Claire Randall goes to the Scottish Highlands with her husband Frank. It’s a second honeymoon, a chance to learn how war has changed them and to re-establish their loving marriage.

But one afternoon, Claire walks through a circle of standing stones and vanishes into 1743, where the first person she meets is a British army officer - her husband’s six-times great-grandfather.

Unfortunately, Black Jack Randall is not the man his descendant is, and while trying to escape him, Claire falls into the hands of a gang of Scottish outlaws, and finds herself a Sassenach - an outlander - in danger from both Jacobites and Redcoats.

Marooned amid danger, passion and violence, her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives.

(Previously published as Cross Stitch)

Outlander Series:
Virgins (Prequel Novella)
Outlander (Originally published in the UK as Cross Stitch)
Dragonfly in Amber
Voyager
Drums of Autumn
The Fiery Cross
A Breath of Snow and Ashes
An Echo in the Bone
Written in my Own Heart's Blood
Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone (Release date to be confirmed)

Visit Diana Gabaldon's website for more information

Review:
I wasn't too sure what to expect from this book going in, it's definitely a polarising story amongst my friends who all seem to either love or hate it so I was a little nervous before I started reading. I've been curious about the TV show for ages though and several friends have raved about the show and begged me to watch it so I decided it was about time I gave the book a try (I can't possibly watch the show without reading the book first!). Anyway, I'm very happy that I fell into the "love it" camp, I can totally understand why some of my friends didn't enjoy it - there were some disturbing things about Claire and Jamie's relationship (particularly in the beginning) and there were a lot of references to rape and an actual rape towards the end of the book (although it was surprisingly a male character who was the victim which I wasn't expecting) - but in spite of the issues I was totally immersed in this world and couldn't put it down.

Outlander is one of those books that pulled me in from pretty much the first page and didn't let me go until the end. Considering it's quite a long book (865 pages for my copy) I finished it in just three days which should tell you something about how much I enjoyed it! I loved meeting these characters, I loved taking a trip back in time and most of all I fell hard for Jamie even though I wanted to slap him a couple of times! There are already thousands of reviews for this book out there so there's probably nothing I can say that hasn't been said hundreds of times before so I'm just tell you that I'm now even more excited about watching the TV series and I can't wait to dive into the next book. I don't think it hurt at all that I had such a clear picture of Jamie before I started reading!

Source: Purchased

Other reviews of this book:
If you have reviewed this book on your blog please leave a link to your review in the comments & I'll add the link here.

Paperback / Kindle: