The Fiery Cross

By Diana Gabaldon

I have finally finished reading the fifth installment of the Outlander Series, The Fiery Cross. It took a while for a few reasons,
1. The book is 1443 pages long. That's a bit much even for me.
2. I was too busy to read.
3. Like Dragonfly in Amber, the book stalled out with it's talk of politics.

I was heartened to finish when I talked about the books recently with my colleague and neighbor Amanda. She had also read the first book and loved it. When she moved onto the second book, she too got bored. We realized it wasn't just her or me, it was the book. So I encouraged her to read Voyager-which is my favorite thus far. In turn she encouraged me to skip forward.
Now skipping forward in books is something I don't make a practice of. Garth does it all the time, but my fear is I will miss something important or at least that I'll miss a good bit of gravy. If it's a book I've read a dozen times like Gone With The Wind, I'll skip parts that I'm not keen to re-read again. Like the descriptions of the Civil War battles-snooze!
In Fiery Cross I was trucking along, things had gotten very exciting with a good death fake-out. Then, boom! Mired down in the politics once again. Then another major character nearly dead! More politics. Snooze. Then finally the culmination of a mystery that's been lingering through the last three books. End scene. Again it's Gabaldon's erratic writing style that bugs me, but on the other hand I need to know what happens to these people!
Now I'm on to the last installment (thus far), A Breath of Snow and Ashes. We'll see how we go....