Dragonfly in Amber

By Diana Gabaldon
Wow. In looking back over the book blog I haven't finished a fiction book in two months. I've been mostly spending time in the Harry Potterverse working on the Snape Theory, so I've been perusing quite a bit of non-fiction on that subject. I had planned to finish Dragonfly in Amber long before I left for Oregon, but I became busy with the Theory and ran out of time. I couldn't take the book with me due to the enormous size of the hardback copy I own. It was also unfortunate that the book began to drag in the last third. Dragonfly in Amber is the continuation of Outlander and while it is a good book it was not as exciting as it's predecessor.
The characters are still amazing, the story is moving, there were interesting plot twists. But again the editing is out of hand. My previous experience with Outlander's editing was an annoyance at obvious grammatical errors. This time there was rambling and unnecessary action. I'm all for descriptive color. One of my favorite authors is John Irving who can ramble on about detail with the best of them. In the case of Diana Gabaldon I find some of it wasteful.
Perhaps my problem is too much Harry Potter and Lost. Both of these creations have so much depth and texture but all of it is carefully constructed and all of it has some deeper meaning. Maybe I'm being too hasty, after all there are at least four more books in the series and more to come that are not published. I think I'm putting this series in the Robert Jordan George R.R. Martin, and Jean M. Auel category of excellent writer, excellent story, amazing scope, however not quite brilliant-and in need of a better editor.
It is still compelling enough a series to move on to the next book Voyager. However the Acknowledgments are disconcerting.... "To...Jackie Cantor, as always, for being the rare and marvelous sort of editor who thinks it's all right for a book to be long as long as it's good..." Hmm, we'll see about that.