"Dragonfly in Amber" ("Outlander" series #2)

I am back! Better late than never ( sorry XD). Today I´m back with a new review of the second part to one my favourite novels: Dragonfly in Amber, the second book in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. 

SYNOPSIS:

“For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland's majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones ...about a love that transcends the boundaries of time ...and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his ....

Now a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire's spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart ...in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising ...and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves”.

Credits to Goodreads.com

REVIEW:

Honestly, I had reservations about reading this book. I read the first part of the saga a few years ago and I loved it, so I was quite scared because even if I had already watched season two of the TV-show, I didn´t know whether this novel would get me as hooked as its previous part.

Dragonfly in Amber is the second book in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and the sequel to the novel with the same name that inspired the popular TV series. 

We don´t meet the characters at the point where we left them in the first novel, instead we fast-forward 20 years in time with Claire, who travels with her daughter to Scotland after Frank´s death. There, she encounters an acquaintance, Roberts, Reverend Wakefield´s adopted child, now a renowned historian. She sends Robert on a mission: to find out whatever happened to some Scottish men in Culloden Moor.  

As I mentioned before I first thought that this book would be as interesting and entertaining as its prequel, as the reader meets different periods and settings. However, Gabaldon surprises the reader introducing new overpowering characters, such as Robert and Brianna and making the plot more appealing with new twists. Besides, the readers infect themselves with Claire´s uncertainty, as she doesn´t know whether Jamie survived the battle of Culloden.

This novel uses the narrative technique of a framed narration, meaning that we have the narration that takes time in 1968 and another one in 1744-1745, the last one being Claire´s account of what happened before she had to return to her own time.

I know there are lots of fans of the TV series that only read the first book, but honestly I recommend this second part. Here we meet a mature Claire that despite having her heart divided in two periods, she is incapable of forgetting the love of her life and has the arduous task of telling her daughter her biggest secret. The book is filled with action and the anticipation that keep the readers on tenterhooks and traps them in between two periods.