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Outlander Book 1 by Diana Gabaldon Summary Study Guide

Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Outlander Book 1


Plot Summary Part 4

Claire feels the power of the stones. But she decides to stay, abandoning Frank to stay with Jamie.


Jamie takes Claire to his ancestral home of Lallybroch.  There they meet Jamie's sister Jenny. Jamie is kind of upset with Jenny because he thinks Captain Randall boned Jenny and impregnated her with her first son. But he learns that Jenny has married a crippled guy named Ian so he can't insult Jenny quite so freely without getting into a fight with Ian. But Jamie does wonder if Jenny told Ian how she had whored herself to Captain Randall. This offends Ian.


Jamie wonders how Randall knows about the mole on Jenny's breast if she didn't have sex with him. Jenny admits opening her shirt to "taunt" Randall with her breasts. Right. Guess what happened next?

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Anyway, in an unrelated anecdote, Jamie flashes back to a scene from years ago when he was hitting on his Uncle Dougal's daughter and Dougal came by and started fondling Jamie's p_nis while holding a knife in the other hand, as a warning to stay away from his daughter. This feels like the 500th unnecessary homoerotic scene in this book.


In another erotic scene, Jenny tells Claire what it is like to be pregnant. She talks about her breasts feeling "heavy and fully... and they're "verra sensitive just at the tips". "And in the last month or so, the milk begins to come in. You feel yourself filling, just a wee bit at a time. And then suddenly, everything comes up hard and round." Later she talks about squeezing her own nipples and milking herself like a cow. A description about pregnancy turns into an erotic sex scene.


In yet another erotic scene, Jenny gives birth to a child, pushing it out of her furry snatch.


Later, Jamie gets captured by the British, put into prison, and is sentenced to death (for some reason).


Claire asks Dougal to help her rescue Jamie. Dougal refuses but thinks it a good time instead to tell Claire how sexually arousing she is to him. Claire reveals how she knows Dougal's secret, that he is really the father of Colum's son, Hamish. How she knows this secret I don't know. It seems there are a lot of sterile men in Scotland, and Colum is one of them. Maybe if the guys stopped wearing skirts their balls could stay warm enough to impregnate their women.


Anyway, Dougal impregnated Colum's wife, and the wife cooperated, and Colum knew about it! Perhaps he even watched. These Scottish people really are kinky.


A side story--Claire finds out that Geilie, who was burned to death, was actually from the future, like Claire, though even farther forward, from 1967.


Claire breaks into the prison holding Jamie and kills some British soldiers but Captain Randall is there and stops her. He agrees to let Claire go but will keep torturing Jamie. He releases Claire but the next day they find that Jamie, badly tortured, has also been released. This is very odd because Jamie was scheduled to be hung.


Jamie revealed that Randall tortured him while raping him repeatedly in the ass. Randall kissed Jamie, put blood on his p_nis and made Jamie suck his p_nis, and then raped him in the ass again and again. How did he do it so many times, did he have Viagra? It is never explained.


Randall hugs Jamie and tells him he loves Jamie even as he tortures him and rapes him in the ass. Then, even more incredibly, Randall releases Jamie even though Jamie is supposed to be killed.


Guess what? Randall is a gay rapist who is in love with Jamie! He actually kisses Jamie and tells him he loves him--or at least his asshole!


Jamie is in very bad shape because in addition to his wounds he is very upset about being raped in the ass. What upset him even more is that Randall "made" Jamie enjoy being raped in the ass and have orgasms from it. What do you know, Randall turned Jamie into a homosexual! This upsets Jamie tremendously.


Claire can't think of what will help Jamie. Finally, she figures out the cure: more rough sex. It works, and afterwards Jamie squeezes Claire's breasts and inexplicably says, "Mother!". So I guess imagining having sex with his Mom turns Jamie on. Just remember a few pages ago Jamie was brainwashed into becoming a homosexual, so Jamie is really messed up.


All this is sick and really twisted.  Anyway, much of the remainder of the book focuses on Jamie's recovery from his gay rape episode.


Claire confesses to a monk that she is from the future and that she has another husband she has been cheating on. The monk tells her that it is ok and she is not to blame. That's been the theme of the entire book--Claire left her husband to go get boned by another guy, and she's not morally suspect. It's a very whorish theme.


Meanwhile Randall is Frank's great great great great grandfather, so we are supposed to hate Frank (her 1945 husband) because his distant relative is a gay rapist.


At the end of the book Jamie has started to recover, and Claire is pregnant. The end.


Criticism:


This book was ridiculous in the extreme. The fantasy element was ridiculous. Circles of stones can send people back in time? How? That was totally unexplained.


But worse than that was the character elements. We are supposed to believe that Claire is forced by circumstance to marry Jamie, but very clearly she wasn't. The whole idea of starting the story with her abandoning a husband in 1945 makes Claire very unsympathetic.


Jamie presenting himself as a man who knows zero about sex, and then becoming a rough sex guy very quickly, also seems ridiculous. The book is filled with allusions to gay sex until the last part is simply full of it, in disgusting detail (like the part where Jamie is sucking blood off a man's p_nis--why are we reading about that?). The book ends up being a story about a gay rape victim. It is very odd content for what is supposed to be a romance between a man and a woman.


Claire quickly adapts to the 18th century and has very little culture shock. I think this cultural adjustment is more realistically what the story should have focused on. Instead the book focused on her sex scenes with Jamie and all the gay encounters Jamie had throughout his lifetime. This was a very weird book.

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