To me, there is something very important missing from this book that made Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber such an amazing reads. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, maybe it’s a number of things really, but I will try to explain what I mean.
Let me start by saying that I absolutely adored the first two books in the series and couldn’t get enough of Claire and Jamie. I loved how the story progresses from them getting married by necessity to slowly falling deeply in love with each other. DG beautifully showed how with time, by getting to know each other this relationship grew, first from fascination to respect and finally true love. I’ll come back to this a little later.
I also feel like the slow pace of the 2 books really allowed me to get to know Claire and Jamie, who they were as people, how they were shaped by the times and societies they lived in, reasons for choices they made. I didn’t always agree with them (like Jamie beating Claire and Claire forgiving him almost immediately) but I felt their actions were consistent with the characters.
In Voyager, I don’t feel this way about Claire and Jamie. I enjoyed the first half of the book where Claire tries to find out if Jamie survived Culloden and makes her decision to go back in time and Jamie’s story of those 20 years. The rest was a disappointment.
Somehow I could not connect the respectable, high-principled Jamie to the smuggler he became. After living an outlaw life for so many years and finally getting a royal pardon he now willingly chose to live an outlaw’s life: smuggle alcohol, print illegal pamphlets, conduct business with questionable acquaintances, keep a room at a whore house and involve his young nephew in these activities. Hmm, not the Jamie I remember.
He explains later in the book that he did it to earn money for Jenny and her family back in Lallybroch and I kept thinking what good would that do for Jenny if he got caught, imprisoned or hanged. But that’s just me.
And then the secrets he keeps from Claire: about his marriage to Laoghaire (!) and having a son with yet another woman. These are not small things you may simply forget to mention to your new/old wife. He purposely keeps them from Claire and it just doesn’t seem like something the old Jamie would do.
There is also something strange about Claire, which another person also pointed out in their review. She is a grown woman in her 50ties now, a surgeon, a mother, a time traveler and yet she doesn’t seem like her old confident self from 20 years before. She is sort of... blah. She is no longer the strong, feisty, confident Claire I learned to love from previous books. It’ almost as if she lost her identity here.
I wrote earlier how in Outlander and DIA DG really skillfully portrayed the evolution of Claire and Jamie’s relationship. This is another big part missing from Voyager. Here, Jamie and Claire almost don’t spend any time together after her return and yet they seem to be right back at the same relationship they had before they separated. How is this possible? Don’t they need time to get to know each other again? To learn who they became and if they can still make this relationship work? Well, I know one thing - it doesn’t work for me. I am very sad and disappointed about it, but I just don’t like this new Claire and Jamie. I don’t like who they became and lost interest in their story. I am truly sad about it. There are some other characters in the Voyager as well, like Fergus and Young Ian but I just don’t care about them enough to read more. I have started Drums of Autumn before I wrote this review and I will finish reading it, but it will be my last book in the series.
I will still strongly recommend Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber to everyone and they will be some of my favorite books I’ve ever read.

To me, there is something very important missing from this book that made Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber such an amazing reads. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, maybe it’s a number of things really, but I will try to explain what I mean.
Let me start by saying that I absolutely adored the first two books in the series and couldn’t get enough of Claire and...