Outlander

I have this as an audiobook read (unabridged) by Davina Porter and it's an entertaining listen. My initial reservations about the book concerned the concept of a modern woman going back in time to a Scotland where women of intelligence and ingenuity were being burned as witches and where women were not much more than chattel in the eyes of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Through a combination of good writing and the way Porter interpreted the book vocally, I was too entertained to care about the more extreme flights of fancy in which I found myself. There are times when the situations the main character gets herself into are so ludicrous that it would make good farce rather than drama but I liked her enough to want to know how she'd get out of these situations alive. If you want to be entertained and can suspend disbelief for the length of the book, you will enjoy it. If you a stickler for believability, you probably won't.

The thing I enjoyed most was probably the various descriptions of everyday life in the period and how Gabaldon finds clever plot twists in (and in spite of!) historical facts. It's fun to see her wriggling in and out of difficulties created through the juxtapposition of modern (circa 1940's) life with that of 500 years earlier.