Customer Rating: 
Summary: No. 6 not a disappointment
Comment: so amazing - to be the sixth book in a series and be even more and as much as the other five. Gabaldon is a genius of a writer and such an amazing crafter of adventures and romance and life! I love this historical fiction series. It has something for everyone. She has done a skilled job at putting you there in history a couple years before the American revolution. Like Johnny Tremain but so much more. I love the medicine that she practices and the intimacy of the relationships. She is very thoughtful and insightful about human nature. Jamie is Da Vinci's Vitruvian man and Michelangelo's David while Claire is every man's dream: capable, passionate and timeless.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your $7.99
Comment: Did Diana Gabaldon have lots of relatives and friends favorably rate this book? I try to finish every book I start because there is usually some gem or life's truth waiting to be discovered. However, after she rambled on for 101 pages, Gabaldon decided to describe a hemorrhoid operation in great detail. Did her publisher require her to fill 1400 pages, and that's what she came up with? Gabaldon writes well, but in this book she just loosely ties together random and unnecessary subjects in a very boring fashion. After reading 101 pages (out of 1,438!), it was time for the trash.
Customer Rating: Summary: WOW !!! What a series
Comment: This book is just one in a series that I can say I wish I had never read....so I could read it again. I can't remember how many books are in the series but if it is seven, I wish it was seventeen. jim
Customer Rating: Summary: 6th in the series
Comment: Historical fiction? General fiction? It's really not romance anymore. If you ask me, only the first book, Outlander, was romance, but nobody's asking me.
And while we're on the subject of things nobody's requesting my opinion on--is this not the plainest, most makeshift cover? I have the hardcover, and it's just really dull. Light gray, plain font. I'm the first to complain about cheesy covers with those shaved-chest cover models (okay, maybe not the first), but surely there's something between embarrassing and something this boring and... well... unprofessional-looking.
On to the book. A Breath of Snow and Ashes is the 6th book in the series that begins with Outlander. I suppose you could read this without having read the rest of the series--but why would you want to? The vast majority of my enjoyment in reading this book came from being invested--for over 15 years--in the saga of Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser and James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser.
If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing about this series, Claire, an English nurse in WWII travels back in time via a stone circle to Scotland, just before the 2nd Jacobite rising. There she meets, falls in love with, and marries Jamie. Now, in the 6th book, they're in America--North Carolina--just before the American Revolution, and once again, Claire knows what's about to happen, but is powerless to change anything in a more than individual way.
I'm not really going to say anything about the plot because at nearly 1000 pages, there's not one overarching plot covering the book. I'm guessing that it simply covers a time period, and that the event at the end (no, I'm not going to spoil it, though if you look through the reviews, you'll find what it is easily enough) was the point Gabaldon wanted to reach by the end of this installment. Unfortunately, most of the action was concentrated at the beginning of the time period covered, and toward the end of the book, weeks and months got skipped over to jump ahead to the prescribed date of the climax.
Pretty much every sort of plot thread you can think of in immediately pre-revolutionary America gets covered--from the fascinating but dangerous dilemma of how and when to change allegiances from the Crown to the Colonies when you know what's going to happen, to a disease epidemic, to the plight of women alone at that time. There's the uneasy melding of different nationalities and religions, the heartbreaking story of the effect of birth defects at that time, the changing relationships with the Indians, and a creepy but strangely sweet 3-way romance.
We catch up with almost all the characters from previous books, find out some of what happened with Young Ian, learn who really fathered Jem, discover more time travelers, and see Roger find himself.
And then there are the inventions. I suppose it's inevitable, and that if I were to travel 200 years into the past, I'd probably be trying to recreate as many modern conveniences and life-saving practices as possible, too, but it got a little old. Claire by herself stuck mostly to the medical and sanitary side of things, but now that Brianna's settled in, she's putting her engineering skills to use and inventing things left and right. Poor Roger's only contribution to modernity is to carve "vrooms" (cars) for the children to play with.
I'd be vastly happier with a 300-page episode every 1 or 2 years that followed a single plot thread from beginning to end than these 1000-page meandering tomes every 5 years or so, but the stage was set from the beginning, so there's no point in changing it now. I'll continue to read the series as long as it lasts, and no doubt I'll edit the books in my head, but I'm not going to complain too much, because I do know what to expect.
Customer Rating: Summary: Another great story of the continuing saga
Comment: I love Diana's style of romance and adventure and this continues. This is worth every minute spent as is all of her other books.
