Dear Internet:
I am tired. I know I said I'd clarify my stance on reading and writing and critique and all that, but work is, as aforementioned, kicking my ass. Also, what little free time this evening afforded me has been spent with someone far more important to me than spreading my thoughts on the subject of Writing and Reader Response. Sorry.
I really will eventually (hopefully soon) blog about it because it's a whole Thing with me, the point about honesty in discourse and why I speak the way that I speak and how our inability/unwillingness to discuss likes and dislikes in very real and concrete terms is pretty much destroying civilization as we know it. Um. But not tonight.
For my faithful and longstanding readers, I know you shall come back and read whatever I blather on about - like how my dinner tonight was a bag of kettle corn and some lemonade, or how my complexion has decided that it really missed out on that acne craze back when I was a teenager so it should really catch up now, or how I'll be meeting the peeps for pizza later this week yay, etc. But there are still an awful lot of people coming over here, and I can only assume it's because of how I made no bones about hating the latest Gabaldon book. They're not here to read about my adorable neffs or my insane ma or how my friends are the coolest ever and you should all be jealous, nyah.
So I'm inviting anyone at all who actually read and LIKED the book to please tell me what was so great about it, and to please dispute any points I made that you think are totally wrong. I'd think that people would feel free to comment on the entry itself, but they don't. So I'm leaving comments open on this post for that purpose.
Please. Disagree with me. Tell me WHY you disagree with me. And hey - listen now, because the vast majority of you don't know me and haven't read anything more than my review of the book: I will not rip into you. I am not looking for a fight. I want intelligent discussion of Why Beth Is Wrong About A Breath Of Snow And Ashes. If you're okay with the rape and how it was handled? Please, please, please explain to me why. Because I cannot fathom it.
And if there are no comments on this post, then I'm going to assume everyone agrees with me that th book is steaming pile and the author is off her rocker. As you should because I am a goddess among women. Clearly.
Goodnight.
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14 comments:
You are TOTALLY a goddess among women. In fact, you and me? We should have our own Greek mountain from which we may hurl lightning bolts and turn dolphins into lovely Greek gods per our whims and pleasures. And there would be peanut butter cookies, tacos and margaritas, triple-decker grilled cheese sandwiches and lemonade, and all sorts of other things terrible for us. I think you're shiny new office is merely the first step! A NAPPING couch. Does it get any better than that?
<3
Personally, I really enjoyed reading your review. I am tired of the gushing reviews for EVERY book that ever gets published. People always find nice things to say about the crummiest books. I like that you called it how you saw it. Even knowing you probably would insult the vast horde of Gabaldon fans that would ultimately find your site and your review.
I have read several books in the past couple of months that came highly recommended from fellow authors, only to find out they stink. Are my standards too high? Am I being overly judgmental? I just think I have very particular tastes, and it takes me awhile to find an author I truly click with.
But I am wimpy and don't go out there telling people how I feel about these authors, these books. You are brave for putting yourself out there.
Okay, so I am going to think about this and haul out that book (annoying silver dust cover hidden away under the bookshelf) and chat with you about a few things. I don't disagree with you entirely. There are a few points I COMPLETELY agree with, in fact. I have to get to the studio right now, so it won't be til later, but I agree that the discussion should be had in intelligent terms and it's important for readers and writers alike. Holla.
oh, good. I'm looking forward to this discussion. I hope the people who were upset come over and hash this out, point by point. Because you know, that would be useful for everybody.
Hi Beth,
I should probably say from the outset that I have long been an avid reader of the "Crosstitch" series. This is not to say that every page of every novel worked for me; there are many things that didn't. "Voyager" was one example; it took a good deal of perseverance to finish it. "Drums of Autumn", on the other hand, I loved almost without exception...anyway, I just wanted to throw my two cents in regarding ABOSA.
One of the central themes of the novel (and of the series of general) is displacement - people out of time, out of place, out of context. The details woven throughout the story - and I concede that there are, at times, a great deal of almost superfluous details - create the fabric of this difference. Descriptions of the best time to harvest lavender and the flimsy nature of wooden shovels do not advance the plot necessarily, but they are important in the world of the characters because they're mundane and the mundane in this world is so very different to their own. One example? Jamie's frequent references to the landscape and environment of the Ridge. It's not the words themselves - neither they nor the landscape has changed markedly since he originally settled there - but what is woven underneath them: the sense that he seeks the smallest of details in an attempt to find commonality with the landscape of Scotland.
Each character manifests this link to their past in their own way - Bree, an engineer, looks for technological solutionsto her problems. Roger closes the distance of the centuries through the familiar tie of song and scripture. Claire attempts to bring her modern medical knowledge to rudimentary 18th century surgery. The 'whole' is too big, but in the details of each, they find enough to satisfy their need for familiarity. Grotesque deaths described in startling detail? Well, why wouldn't they be - they are so far beyond the realm of 'normal' for the twentieth century that I don't wonder that Roger or Bree would shocked into cataloguing detail. The end result is a very chunky novel, about 30% of which actually advances the plot. But then, a story is more than mere plot and I - and this is a personal preference - will generally sacrifice the pace of a plot for a deeper exploration/illustration of wider themes.
There were parts of this novel I didn’t particularly like, and I do agree that Claire's rape appeared (at first consideration, at least) to be something of a non-sensical tangent. There was purpose, I now think, in that it gives Claire a better understanding of what Jamie endured in Scotland, but it wasn't well handled and I also agree that the resolution of both the rape and Marsli's health was awkward at best. I also think it served (again, awkwardly) as a catalyst to allow articulation of some of the post-traumatic shock that seems to be starting to affect Claire - references to the Second World War seem to be more frequent in this novel, as to references to Culloden and certain events in France.
A quick point regarding Brianna - I would argue that she's not good or competent at 'everything'. To the contrary, I think she struggles with the very things that define femininity in the 18th century: the ability to keep house, to mind her place, to be a wife and mother foremost and at the expense of herself. She chafes and complains and throws her energy into things that seem unimportant in the events of the novel, but I nevertheless find her actions appropriate in the context of her situation. I don't always like her, but as a character I find her more complete than, say, the Beardsley twins.
Finally, regarding historical detail – I found that there was enough there to be adequate for the purposes. I gather that the importance of various events was only retrospectively identified by the contemporary population and, in marked contrast to the actions of Jamie and Claire leading up to Culloden, I felt that this was a good portrayal of people who are hyper-aware that everything they do is about to feed into (and is perhaps pre-ordained by) an event much larger than the sum of their lives. I have no idea how much of this period of history is 'common knowledge' in the States; it's not taught at all in our school system and I did a great deal of (other) reading about this period whilst reading the novel - but this was an entirely personal research drive; I thought the novel contained enough for the average reader.
Thanks, Meredith, for articulating what you enjoyed about the book.
While I agree that the level of detail lends a richness to the characters' experiences, I also have to point out that it's not the level of detail that I found so excruciatingly boring. I do have a limit on how much detail I actually enjoy in any book, but am generally pretty tolerant when the prose is great. The minutiae should be there and should act as a single element of a much larger story; instead, in ABOSA, it becomes the story.
I've actually been thinking a lot about how much of my reaction was caused by bad storytelling and how much is a result of too much time spent with the characters and within this world. It's been at least ten years that I've been reading, after all. So I thought of other series that I've been with and the only one I've read that's gone on for six books and that I still like as much? The Harry Potter books. Which seems nuts since Gabaldon's skillful (earlier) writing is so much better than Rowling's. But what makes me stick with and thoroughly enjoy the HP books - why it works, in my opinion - is that the focus stays the same throughout:
1. Though new characters come and go (or even come and stay), the series is always about the same characters that I've known and loved from the beginning. I am following that person's life. That's what I signed up for. That's what the focus is.
2. The same challenge is always in front of this well-loved character. In the case of HP, it's about trying to grow up and be some kind of normal when some bad guy who killed his parents now wants to kill him and acheive Ultimate Eviltude. In the case of Jamie and Claire, it's creating and maintaining a life together, and not letting Time tear them apart.
In ABOSA, both of these were neglected, for about 900 of the nearly-1000 pages of it. There was no focus. There was just description of this and that and the other and then you get to the end and ta-da, we're going back to Scotland for reasons that we won't explain. Or maybe they were explained, but I slept peacefully right through it.
What you describe as "sacrificing the pace of a plot for a deeper exploration/illustration of wider themes" - I don't see that AT ALL. There IS no deeper exploration of wider themes. She used to do this in earlier novels by having the characters discuss things - the Deep Conversations that would often last for pages. I LOVE those conversations. There were virtually none in this book. Roger and Bree leave and all that's said is, "We'd already said our goodbyes." And then they're off through the stones, buh-bye. That's it. Another example: when Claire tries to convince the 18th century people to let her put them to sleep with ether, she tells us they react badly. They'd rather live with pain or die than to be put into a dreamless sleep. That is SO COOL. But is it illustrated? Is it explored as a theme, giving us a really fascinating discussion on not just the mindset of people 200 years ago, but people in our modern-day world? Not really. It's just sort of an annoyance that interferes with her experiments, the end. There are countless examples of this in the book, but I swear I'd rather spend an evening reading Barbara Bush's dog's autobiography biography than to even consider opening ABOSA again.
As for the grisly stuff, I still maintain that for the love of GOD: Less Is More. Certainly it's a part of life back then and certainly it should shock. But I don't see how anyone can read that book and NOT agree that it is a series of Horrific Things Described In Horrific Detail. It was a relentless march of some of the worst things one can imagine witnessing. And honestly - what was the purpose? The family dying of dysentery (or whatever disease caused it) was an excellent thing. It was horrible, realistic, and it served to remind the from-the-future characters (and the reader) what a different and dangerous time they're living in. (Hi, like they need a reminder fter Bree gets raped and Roger gets hanged? Really? REALLY??) Bree's reaction to that, and Jamie and Claire's discussion of what it means to live a life without war and hunger and disease surrounding you - what it means, in essence, to live in the world that we all currently live in - is just fabulous stuff. But put it on top of all the other gruesome things before and after, and it loses its punch. It all becomes gratuitous, there just for shock value. It's way too much of the same thing, and we should all know the law of diminishing returns, no?
Bree - I actually finally LIKED her in Fiery Cross. But I mean really - she's tall and beautiful, an excellent artist, knows shoot a gun and is a great hunter (which, face it - not exactly all that believable), and spends her free time building a kiln, planning a plumbing system for the Ridge, inventing a good shovel, making paper, and somehow knowledgably playing around with phosphorous and inventing matches. Oh, and she can recite entire poems off the top of her head. And dabbled in history. plus the wife and mother gig. Every book introduces us to something new that she's good at. Sorry, I just read that character and think man, make up your mind who she is and stick with it, pleeeeease.
I guess I expected this book to deal with the Revolution the same way that Dragonfly dealt with Culloden. Seems a reasonable enough expectation to me. And it seems all set up for that to happen, what with his son being in the British Army and Jamie set to fight on the American side (SO COOL, and I WANT to watch that unfold) and with this handful of people knowing and preparing for what will come. But it just didn't happen in this book. It's like the story and characters are in this holding pattern, going around and around in circles before deciding to land. It's hundreds and hundres of pages of dithering, and it's worn my patience down.
One more thing, though (assuming anyone's read this much blethering) -- I did forget to mention that the Tom Christie storyline was just absolutely wonderful. A perfect example of the right kind of tangent. It was beautiful, and unexpected, and the kind of really great detour that used to fill these books. Sadly, it was only one chapter out of about one hundred.
Well. I liked the book.
I've got to say there are comments here with which I agree, but there are a few small points in defense of ABOSA that I wanted to make.
To me, the silver dust-jacket looks like a present, not an indigestible snack wrapped in foil. Still a little hard on the eyes, but with pleasant associations all the same. (If you can't actually see my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I assure you it's there.)
And the rape thing. I hear what you're saying, the fact that everybody gets raped somewhere in the series detracts from the impact. However, that sort of brutality was common at that time, so I'll take that into consideration. I saw it in a slightly different light, in that I was actually... all right, relieved would most certainly not be the right word to use here, but it's close. I was in some small way glad that Jamie didn't show up in the nick of time to save Claire while she hovers on the point of being ravished by a Nasty Man. That was getting old. I didn't like the fact that the scene happened, but if we accept that she's been abducted by that particular crowd, I found it more realistic to have her actually suffer _something_ than having her be saved in time. Again. I do think Jamie's thoughts about her being pregnant were...puzzling. I like Claire, or I wouldn't line up with my $40 every single time one of these books comes out. But I've noticed that terrible things seem to happen around her, and she somehow escapes relatively unscathed. No doubt I'm forgetting all sorts of things, but my general feeling remains the same. The fight with the German lady, the Malva betrayal, again, I didn't like it but I thought it easier to accept that Claire, like all of us, is brought low from time to time. I hate it, but there it is.
The Roger-and-the-burned-child scene, I don't like having that in my head. I do see it as a comment on the things that people went through, the out of control animosity that was brewing before the war. If we're going to feel anything while we come understand this war and the people that fought it, a strong image of real suffering and real victims is not out of place.
The Marsali reveal was disappointing, and I do confess to feeling let down with "We'd already said our goodbyes." And I agree, Brianna annoys me sometimes. I can't relate to her. At All.
As to plot furtherance and cohesion, should ABOSA have dealt with the war more succinctly? Perhaps. Still, I enjoyed the book. I would rather feel something while I'm reading, even if it's horror, than yawn over politics (like I did through the first part of the Fiery Cross). It meanders, but that's in keeping with the series, they all do, to a point. Overall, I think most of Ms. Gabaldon's fans have a reasonably good idea what they're getting for their money, and if it isn't "Literature," well, neither is Stephen King. That wasn't what I wanted when I bought the book.
Is she capable of better? Yes. Was there oodles of potential here that didn't get developed? Yes, you're right. Will I buy the next one anyway? Yes, I will.
Okay sorry, Cindy, I've been meaning to respond and then Life overtakes me. You make some good points, chiefly about Claire's rape. My initial reaction when she got kidnapped was oh but she'll never get raped, because even though that'd be the first thing that a REAL posse of bad guys would do, it's Claire - and Rule 1 of Outlander series is that Everyone Gets Raped Except Claire. And then two guys really only squirted on her.
Fine okay, but in a sense I WAS glad she got raped because it was more realistic than yet another nick-of-time rescue. What REALLY pissed me off was everything after. And it pissed me off enough that I'm past forgiving the little foibles of implausible plotting and tedious meanderings. It disgusted me, because the audience for this book is overwhelmingly female. And somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes. And I repeat: Fuck you, Diana Gabaldon. Fuck you very much for treating a rape victim like that. It wasn't just that the characters didn't act like themselves AT ALL - it's that it was incredibly gratuitous and insulting. And sickening.
And sidenote - that's what gets me about people calling my review "sickening". My calling a book a piece of shit is vomit-inducing, but that afer-rape sequence ISN'T? How fucked up ARE people? Politicalish analogy: Tucker Carlson said he wanted to throw up watching Clinton on TV after Katrina. Maher said that seeing dead bodies in the streets of N.O. wanted to make him throw up.(Video/transcript) Jesus, people need to stop being so out of whack, ya know? End of sidenote.
Someone somewhere else said it best about this book: I don't feel for Jamie and Claire (or any of em) anymore. The most remarkable thing about my reading of this book was the utter lack of sympathy I had for any of them. And again - I LOOOOOOOVED these people. Love. And in this book, I just want them to die so I don't have to think about them anymore. And without caring about the characters, there's nothing that lets me forgive all the bad writing.
Anyway, I think I was where you are after I read Fiery Cross: I was disappointed but I'd still read the next, because I'm in it to the bitter end. So I bought ABOSA. And it crossed the line from Tolerably Bad to An Insulting Waste Of My Time And Money.
And there are TWO MORE after this one. Good lord. My life is too short for voluntary torture.
In Australia we were spared the shiny cover which I understand must have been off-putting.Maybe it set your teeth on edge so much that you read the whole thing in a negative irritated haze?
I let my copy sit by the bed for a week before I opened it. I was scared that it would be bad & scared that Jamie would die. Slowly I began to read one or two chapters at a time & slowly I was drawn back into that world & the lives of those two fascinating people, so that I read more & more & ended up reading the last 400 pages straight through.Since I finished the book I have been wandering through my day surrounded by mists & echoes from it. [Pause to clarify "bad". Surely you would admit that DG writes well? Her dialogue always rings true to me & her use of vernacular is excellent.Her sentence structure is good, her descriptions are vivid & her characters are so real that you seem personaly insulted (as in 'insulting waste of my time & money') by them not behaving the way that you would expect. When you say 'all the bad writing' it seems to me that you object to the plot not going where you want it to go.
When I say bad I mean "not as great as Crosstitch".]
I loved the book.
The small bitsy chapters seemed like weaving or tapestry which built up little by little a picture of two people growing old gracefully together & delighting in each other.
The violence did not seem gratuitous or excessive. The horrors they go through mould them & change them & the decisions they make show us who they are eg. The burnt child haunts Roger & is a significant factor in his decision to become a minister.
Jamie's reaction to the rape seems idiosyncratic but understandable (he is supposed to be an 18thC male & not a SNAG) & completely in character. He is trying to deal with one of the few factors he CAN & spare Claire any further pain if at all possible. He does not think of her as aging/ menopausal/ whatever & in my experience, men in these situation have to do SOMETHING/ANYTHING active that they can.
The Marsali details also seem realistic to me. Something that looms as a huge thing in prospect (is she dead?) almost immediately becomes minor when it doesn't happen (no, she's not.)
Quite frequently throughout the series major scenes are not descibed as you would expect but seen later in flashback. I like the way more & more details are revealed at unexpected times & for that reason did not mind the lack of a 'goodbye scene', nor do I expect every plot line to be tied up neatly at the end, because by then it is clear that it is not the end. This is a series & some of us at least will be reading the next one & finding out all sorts of things that may be missing at present.
I could go on, but am out of time. To conclude then:
Your review did not offend me but I was saddened by Sara/Rosina's comment that she would not read ABOSA having read it. (There's an ugly sentence!) I would like to say to her "Hey I'm a Niccolo fan, so must have some taste, & I loved it. Maybe you could give it a go & tell us what you think?"
Dorothy --
If I read it, and I was as terribly disappointed in it as Beth was, would you want to hear about that?
Some commenters are really angry at me as it is, for even raising this subject. I can hardly imagine what they'd say if I posted my own review of this book that turned out to be negative.
I'm damned if I do (read it) and damned if I don't.
Rosina,
I would be quite happy to hear what you thought, though I can understand your position. I don't really understand the extreme vehemence of the reactions to Beth's review & only joined this debate to give a positive view ( at your behest!)
Here’s my cred:
I am a participant in Ladies of Lallybroch. As you may know, negative opinions about the books are not allowed there, but it doesn’t mean that I or others of the Lads and Ladies don’t harbor them. All my books are signed by Diana, and I have a photo with her and her husband.
In brief:
Beth, your review was over the top. ABOSAA is not the worst, but it’s not the best either. The book was depressing. I slogged through all of the Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series like an idiot. The first book – creative and engaging. I don’t remember where I though the author lost it, but I do remember hanging in there WAY too long. This was not that bad. These books are not giant steaming turds. We are not talking about Dan Brown’s Deception Point here (a slimmer volume, yet looming much larger in turd scale).
On a scale of 1 to 10, where Outlander is an 8 (and some mythical Great Literature gets a 10), Deception Point is like a 2, some Harlequin Romance full of sentence fragments is a 1, and ABOSAA is a 4 or a 5.
Here’s my rant:
After investing close to 5,000 pages in the adventures of Jamie and Claire and their friends, I think I’m in for a penny, in for a pound.
My attachment to the series is such that I can pretty much rationalize anything the characters say or do. But the things that happen to them – WAY over the top in this book. I was at page 900 something and Claire was abducted AGAIN and I really couldn’t sympathize. I mean, come ON. But then, the torture the author inflicts on Roger in the two books preceding this series was over the top. Each time, he’s so close to being savable before the Bad Thing happens.
I personally think the series lost its way in Voyager. It’s so grounded in Scottish culture that instead of having one fish out of water (Claire), there are two. But DOA & FC didn’t completely suck. Actually I reread them this summer while waiting for ABOSAA so I would remember who all the characters were. Even the whole dirty diapers, leaky boobs thing reinforced the immediacy of 18C life. DG could never be accused of over-romanticizing the past.
What is happening in ABOSAA is that the unraveling of order and governance in the colonies is being enacted in miniature in Jamie and Claire’s world. Neighbor turning against neighbor – yep, got it. Old grudges being cloaked in political terms – yep, got it. Virtually no family unaffected by the violence – yep, got it. DG is also trying to give us a different view of the American Revolution than what we learned in storybooks: revolutions as a messy personal business where higher principles play a very small role.
Furthermore, Jamie and Claire are getting OLDER. They have progressed from being younger than me, to being my age, and now being older than me. This makes their reactions and responses to events different than the young Jamie and Claire. One thing I missed in the latest book was sex scenes. Sex was more perfunctory than incendiary. I thought the torch might have been passed Roger and Brianna, but not so much.
Drawing modern characters is a weakness of DG’s. I hope she succeeds with the contemporary mystery she has been working on, because for some reason every 1960s scene sounds wooden. Wendigo Donner is no exception, and he sounds even lamer in the established 18C milieu. I was really hoping he’d die just because he was so annoying.
In response to Beth and her blog:
1) Dust cover – a red herring. Get over it.
2) Ok – the first abduction of Claire. The point of this was to show us that our happy enclave in Fraser’s Ridge was Not Safe. Yes, our heroes are tooling around in the woods, indeterminate distances from home finding crispy bodies etc., but they are very much Not Immune. There is no rule of law, and every single person who they have even mildly pissed off since Drums of Autumn gets a chance to take a shot at them. In past books, only really psycho characters wanted to hurt women. (Stephen Bonnet, Black Jack Randall). These backwoods guys are a whole other kind of bad guy. It’s a more contemporary form of violence – diffuse, arbitrary, and random. And I think Claire thinks of Jamie and Marsali so she doesn’t have to think about herself. As a doctor, that’s her way. Then, afterwards, she has post-traumatic stress disorder and is very busy thinking about the wrong kinds of things (and I don’t doubt that Diana looked up PTSD). WTF took Jamie so long? It’s the real world, and Jamie was fallible. He took a left instead of a right, or something. This is just one of those books where if the coin is tossed, it lands ass up every time.
So why post-rape sex? It definitely isn’t in any of the crisis-center handbooks. First of all, Jamie genuinely believed she could be pregnant. One of the most interesting things about Jamie, that makes him more than a red-headed Fabio doll, is that he’s a 18th century man. His whole programming is very different from a 20th century man. He knows the Catholic Bible backward and forwards, and when Sarah (or whatever elderly woman from the Old Testament) got pregnant, he reads that as a biological possibility. But, he’s not an insensitive dolt (nooo, not our Jamie). So he kind of shops the idea around. They don’t go at it like bunnies – Claire is angry and she’s exorcising her demons as they go at it (including, I think, some anger at Jamie for being late).
3) Claire’s attitude toward Lord John. Claire might be a 20th C woman, but she was born in something like 1922, which means that if she had stayed in her own timeline she’d be 82. People of that time didn’t know shit about homosexuality. And Claire is too jealous of Lord John to try to really know him. Jamie isn’t flying the rainbow flag at Fraser’s Ridge either; he is basing his judgment on his knowledge of LJG as a person and a man of honor. And yes, it made Claire look bad. To me, to herself, and to Jamie. But then, Claire’s always had a big mouth. And, as she gets older, it’s probably going to be more so, not less so, as these things are wont to be.
4) You came close to my pet peeve with the penicillin experiments, but MY pet peeve is Brianna spending every waking hour trying to recreate 20th century amenities. It’s like Gilligan’s Island, for heavens sake, with her quest for a hot shower. I live very close to MIT, and I can tell you they don’t teach any of that stuff there.
Thanks for opening a dialog on this.
Dorothy -- I think it's great you came over here to carry on with this discussion. I really do.
Sorry if I came off a tad defensive.
poodlebites -- It's fantastic to get some input from the LOL crowd, because you're right -- my sense was that in LOL land, there's no room for this kind of discussion. I'm glad Beth has taken the step.
I'm several books behind in this series, as I gave up for similar reasons. Therefore, it's been a pleasure and an education on what I missed reading to catch up via your blog.
The real problem I'd have with this rape in A Breath of Snow And Ashes, if I were to read the book?
Rape is the most over-used element Gabaldon has in plotting. When Brianna was raped in the fourth book I stopped to count how many character, major and minor, had been raped in the series. Everybody except Roger, 'cause I was counting Claire and the king in Dragonfly in Amber, though a discussion of rape-is-violence-not-just-sex-against-the-victim's-inclination to narrow that definition.
My biggest, most overwhelming problem with the series is that I don't believe Claire is British. There's some coy tapdancing by the author to get around that in the first book (orphan raised abroad, constantly traveling with her uncle), but her choice swearing is an American refereince, she's got an analogy to something being like drinking Coca-Cola once during the war, and there are precious few reflexive descriptions of anything in terms of the life of an adult woman ripped from 1940s Europe into the past.
And that is why the research isn't up to snuff. The 20th century stuff is mostly absent or off. Sure, 18th century Scotland is gritty and sexy and whoo-hoo, kilts. But Monty Python's "Spanish Inquisition" sketch probably didn't air in the USA in time for Brianna, much less Claire, to get that joke in the fourth book. And I suspect that "do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars" wasn't a common reference for a British woman in the 1940s, yet Claire says it to Jamie in the second book.
Don't get me started on the idiocy of Claire's response in book four about the German word rache with, "I know what it means, I've read Sherlock Holmes."
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