Source: Own Collection
Format: Kindle
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewer: Laurel
Honest review, hmmm? I put the book down at the 32% mark. I’d had enough. While I admired the historical research and the portrayal of the harshness of life in the 1700s, I didn’t like either of the main characters. For me, they were both inconsistent. It seemed Jamie had more of an idea of the forces at work around them, but that didn’t really come across very clearly – I felt like I kept being TOLD what his character was like rather than being shown it, and when I was shown it, it felt like a token gesture that was judged by Claire (seeing as this was written in her first-person POV). And Claire… I felt was just being whipped around by the tides with very little thought process and sensibility of her position in the place and time. And where there was thought process, it was again not shown, so one had little idea why she made the decisions she made.
However, I am not a quitter, and I picked the book up again. And finished reading it. It was ok, but I wouldn’t rate it higher than that. However, I will give a firm nod to Gabaldon’s research and portrayal of life back then – I definitely commend and respect it. And it’s for this reason only that this book gets three stars from me, and not the two the “it was ok” would garner.
– It’s a terrifying future war on a far away planet unspeakably hostile to human life. While the slaughter is wholesale and nearly complete, the soldiers of this combat will find they have more to fear from their own kind than the enemy.
– He recently returned from an uneventful patrol in near space of the solar system. Though he recalls nothing odd about the voyage, something has gone terribly wrong. Standing before a mirror in his home, he realizes he has somehow found himself on the wrong side of backwards.
– Having crash landed on a forgotten and hostile planet tucked away in a distant corner of the galaxy, the ragged, starving remnants of a once-promising colonizing voyage struggle to survive themselves and the harshest conditions nature can throw at them. Each future generation depends on the sacrifices of the generations gone before and a single taciturn cyborg.
– Mike and Ron arrive at their favorite fishing hole of an evening with plenty of bait and plenty of beer and plans to catch the usual mess of fish while exchanging vivid stories and bawdy jokes. It’s their weekend ritual. This trip, however, will be significantly different for unearthly reasons. By the end of the night, one of them will have to return home alone to explain the mysterious disappearance of the other.
– Landing in the most desolate and sparsely populated continent on Earth, these foreign invaders would capitalize on a long and agonizing winter to hide their preparations for invasion. By the arrival of spring, they would establish an undeniable bridgehead on the planet.
– It is a machine void of machinery, a probe constructed of light and energy, sent on a distant errand of discovery into the farthest reaches of the cosmos. There, it will find the beginning is the end, and it will learn that the largest and smallest of things share a common origin.
– His wife is a nag. His life is an unfulfilling failure. He only has one thing going for him, his personal computer. When he installs a mysterious operating system that promises personal companionship, his fate takes a deadly turn, and he can no longer imagine living without his newfound love, VOX.
– In an age of genetic modification and radical experimentation, one scientist is playing with the concepts of immortality as confined within a machine. He will ultimately succeed in his quest, but he will leave that last door standing wide open and a chimera will wander through it into a strange and foreboding freedom.
– The planet teems with unwashed masses and the wealth of the top one percent is greater than the worth of the remaining ninety-nine percent, combined. This disparity of worth has reduced the vast majority of humankind to the status of commodity. A global lottery determines who dies and who lives forever.
– A special agent sent out-world to recover a woman who knows something she shouldn’t, something that could change the future of all human kind. Theirs is a race against time and the odds do not favor their success. Can he get her to safety before a powerful enemy liquidates her?
– In the ravaged aftermath of an apocalyptic future war, a pair of twins struggle to survive, feeding themselves with tossed-away scraps and rumors of a better place. When his sister dies a hungry, lonely death, the boy vows to learn the truth. He will brave monsters of the wasteland to find sanctuary. If it exists, at all.
– Tired of the endless lies of youth and the unfulfilled promises of adulthood, one man decides to put reality to the ultimate test. Standing in line at a bank to make a final withdrawal with a handgun in his pocket, he remains unconcerned when a gang of criminals burst into the lobby. After all, they still believe in the lies he has long since abandoned, and he is the violent kind.
– The ZuZu is a futuristic time clipper, a spacecraft capable of zapping backward and forward in time. As it embarks on its latest combat mission, one of the crew smuggles a forbidden keepsake onboard. It’s a rose-shaped medallion given to him by his youngest daughter. After a spectacular military victory, he finds the petals missing, along with the entire population of his home world. Can he alter space and time to return his family to the present as he remembers it?
Zhurrat Reviews 