The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

I consider Wally Lamb to be one of the most personally influential authors I have read. I have waited in anticipation for this book to be released. He lacked in areas I normally site as his strength - character development. Usually Lamb has the power to pull you into the body of the character and feel their emotions with them however in this work, I merely felt that he used side stories to distract from the fact that none of them had depth. Maureen, 'Mo' is the character I found the most appealing, but because the story is written from her husbands point of view, her deep tragedy goes without any sort of lasting impact on the reader. Lamb claims to have chosen events & people that occurred over the past 8 years to draw inspiration from and give them everlasting tributes through their impact in his characters lives. But all he manages to achieve is a listless and unconvincing review of the events of the stories we still see day to day on the 6 o'clock news. His closing remarks reveal that he struggled with writing this book, and I believe the pressure got to him... he wasn't true to himself in this work. Such a shame

Voyager by Diana Gabaldon

When I finished Dragonfly in Amber I thought I was finished with Jamie and Claire for a while, but, obviously, I wasn't. The third in the 'Outlander' series and still kept me riveted. In this enstallment, Claire is in her own time and its twenty years later from the time she first went back (1945)and she has a daughter from Jamie, Brianna who is 20 years old.
Claire is now a succesful doctor living in Boston and still longs for her lost love, a Scottish warrior from the 18th century named Jamie Fraser. Her twentieth century husband Frank having passed away two years ago, Claire is feeling that heartwrenching pull to return to her love.
But how does a mother leave her only child to find a man she once knew and loved almost two hundred years ago? How does she explain this to the man's daughter who looks just like him? Just seeing Brianna makes her heart ache for Jamie.
With the help of Brianna and a friend who studies genealogy charts, Claire finds out that Jamie somehow survived the bloody Battle of Culloden! Dare she risk another trip through the stones to find him?

I highly recommend this series. The books are very long but once you start you don't want it to end. I cannot wait to read the next book in this series.

Dragonfly In Amber by Diana Gabaldon

This is a time-traveling romantic adventure of the adventures Dr. Claire Beauchamp Randall, a 20th-century American who goes to Scotland in search of her 18th-century husband, virile Scot Jamie Fraser, whom she met and married in Outlander. She is in the present but as she hopes to find a state or time (like that of the title's dragonfly suspended in a piece of amber) where Fraser still exists. This book is over 900 pages but it kept me enthralled from page one. Not very many authors can write a 900+ page book and keep every single page interesting. I can't wait to start the third one but I think I will take a little break from Scotland for a while.