Our Quiet Growing Time

I am unequal to the task of summarizing over 9,000 pages of conflict into a concise paragraph to set up where The Scottish Prisoner fits in the whole of Gabaldon's massive canon of delicious tomes.  Let's just say: 1) read the Outlander series; and 2) the events in this latest Gabaldon take place during a gap in Voyager, and is in itself a continuation of Lord John Grey's story. This book has the exquisite double-whammy of featuring both Lord John and our favorite Highland warrior, the strapping Jamie Fraser (the Scottish prisoner of the title), who currently is serving his sentence as a traitor to the Crown as a groom at the estate of friends of Lord John. The last we saw Lord John and Jamie together (in the sequence in which this story fits) was in an uncomfortable scene in a stable in which an angry declaration of desire was made, a punch was thrown, a well-formed nose narrowly avoided smashing, and readers blushed in libraries and living rooms across the w...

The Premise: Carrie McClelland, best-selling novelist, winters at a Scottish cottage to work on her latest project, a novel using her own real-life ancestor, Sophia McClelland, as the heroine. In the writing of it, memories and voices fill Carrie's mind and she soon realizes that it's not her own hand that's guiding her pen... but Sophia's memories, revealing 300-year-old secrets that could impact Carrie's own life. The Theme:   "...You couldn't just remember something if you hadn't had it in your memory to begin with. Could you?" The Winter Sea explores the idea of genetic memory: the possibility of inheriting ancestors' memories. It's an interesting--though silly--concept, but it was presented in a way that mostly minimized the hokeyness of it. Don't mean to offend you mystics out there, but I just don't buy it.  The Good: How's this for introducing Carrie's love interest? I gave 5 st...