A Breath of Snow and Ashes

[goodreads]

Title: A Breath of Snow and Ashes
Author: Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: 9/10
# pages: 980
Date read: December, 2008

Summary: The year is 1772, and on the eve of the American Revolution, the long fuse of rebellion has already been lit. Men lie dead in the streets of Boston, and in the backwoods of North Carolina, isolated cabins burn in the forest.

With chaos brewing, the governor calls upon Jamie Fraser to unite the backcountry and safeguard the colony for King and Crown. But from his wife Jamie knows that three years hence the shot heard round the world will be fired, and the result will be independence - with those loyal to the King either dead or in exile. And there is also the matter of a tiny clipping from The Wilmington Gazette, dated 1776, which reports Jamie's death, along with his kin. For once, he hopes, his time-traveling family may be wrong about the future.

Review: I probably thought higher of this when I read it last, but for what I think is the first time ever I didn't rush through one of Gabaldon's books, but actually took the better part of a month to read it. part of this is certainly that it's such a long book, and a book I'd read before so I felt no need to rush through it to know what happened, but it was also that it suddenly struck me how much calamity befell the lives of the Frasers... and it simply stopped being believable - even in their universe.

Still, Gabaldon is a capable writer, and I did enjoy the book hugely - after all, it still gets a good rating :) We got a lot of loose threads tied up, which I appreciate and I especially enjoyed the ending, even if it does make me wonder how she'll continue in her next book... whenever that may come out.

Book List

Comments

[jadeejf.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that this one was the last one in the Fraser series... have you heard anything differently?

[bogormen.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's at least one more called "Echo in the Bones". Not sure if that's the last or the second to last though... you might be able to see on her website.

[jadeejf.livejournal.com]

Really? Wow. Good to know :) Thanks!

[bogormen.livejournal.com]

No problem. I thought ABoSA was the last too, because it seemed so "complete", so it wasn't until somebody else told me about Echoes that I knew otherwise.