Drums of Autumn

"I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me."
First paragraph of Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

I read Drums of Autumn as my 4th book for the Back To History Challenge , jumping into this chunkster with both feet, not realizing that it was actually the 4th in the "Outlander" series. For some reason when I picked it up, I thought I was going to be immersed in the civil war. I was completely wrong. This book is set in Pre-Revolutionary America and is a continuing time travel saga. I hadn't read the first 3 in the series, so know that there are things that I missed and somethings that I didn't quite know what had happened, but for the most part it read very well as a stand-alone book. The author did a good job of filling in details from the former novels.
A story of timeless love and adventure. Claire is a 20th century doctor who somehow (in the first novel) has traveled through time via an ancient stone circle in modern day Scotland. There she meets and falls in love with Jamie, an 18th century Scottish Highlander. Fast forward 20 or so years to our novel, where Claire and Jamie are living in 1770's North Carolina and their daughter, Briana is in 20th century Boston. Claire had traveled back through the circles while pregnant with Briana during the Scottish uprisings, given birth and raised her in modern day America. Claire has since re-joined Jamie in the 18th century and left Briana, a grown woman, to her own devises. Briana and her boyfriend, Roger, come across an old document that tells them that Briana's parents died prematurely in a fire, so Briana, unknown to Roger, heads through the circles to find her parents and try to change history. Roger figures out what she has done and follows her into the past. Much adventure follows.
It really was a good book and held my attention well, through most of the 1070 pages. At the end I was ready to be done and move on to the next book on my shelves. I did enjoy this one, but will probably not read the others in the series, though the reviews that I checked out on Amazon are all very positive.

I'm off now to San Francisco to spend a little time with the Mistress of the Spices...