Product Description

On its long awaited release The Fiery Cross prompted excited New Zealanders to queue outside bookshops for hours… and knocked the boy wizard firmly off the top spot in the bestseller lists. It’s the fifth instalment in a series which began with Cross Stitch (1991), in which Claire Randall finds herself with a husband in one century and a lover in another because a stroll through a Highland stone circle has carried her back in time to 1743. The community of highlanders she joins during the Jacobite Rebellion are convinced she is a witch by her medical skills and incredible knowledge of the future. If you want to see the stir it created, read the reader reviews!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15368 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1072 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
To describe Diana Gabaldon's novel The Fiery Cross as epic barely does it justice; this massive successor to the much-acclaimed Drums of Autumn weighs in at nearly a 1,000 pages, and is squarely aimed at those readers who want to enter the world of a book and remain thoroughly immersed for a lengthy period. It's essential that such a book can offer riches: riches in dense, complex plotting, riches in larger-than-life protagonists, riches in sheer story-telling skill. Gabaldon, thankfully, has it all.

After a list of acknowledgments that is long enough to tell us that this is an author who takes her time, we are plunged into the Colony of North Carolina in the year 1771, with a volatile society not under threat from Britain so much as from a bitter internal conflict. The divisions are between the colonial aristocracy, secure in their wealth, and the disadvantaged pioneers, carving out a rugged living in the shadow of the mountains of the west. Caught between them is Jamie Fraser of Fraser's Ridge, who is at ease with both sides. But Jamie's wife is the beautiful Claire, unable to integrate in the manner of her husband, always out of place. Her ability to discern the future warns of the pending revolution, and in the bloodshed that follows, the love of Jamie and Claire will be tested in the forge of war.

Gabaldon's canvas frequently evokes the epoch-spanning South of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, but Gabaldon is very much her own woman: this is romantic writing, but tempered with a steel edge that makes for an exuberant, turbulent blockbusting read.--Barry Forshaw

CNN.com
Probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit

The Northen Echo
Both moving and magical

Customer Reviews

Not same quality as previous books
I came late to this series and have therefore had luxury of reading them all when all 6 books are published. I read books 1-3 in a heartbeat and couldn't put them down. However the Fiery Cross is leaving me cold. If I read one more page about chuffing baby breast feeding and what people have had for their tea I will lose the will to live.

Where on earth is the bigger picture, this book is DROWNING in minutae. I am not going to give up but truely hope it gets better (only on page 600 but felt strongly enough to write this....)

The fiery Cross

I must say i was a little dissappointed with this book where as with the others i just couldn't put them down this one i had a job to get into. I did plough though it and finish it but i found it very long winded. I think the same timespan and events could have been delt with in half the amount of pages. This book ended up taking me many months to read against a couple of weeks each for the others.
I enjoy reading about Claire and Jamie especially as when i first started reading the series my daughter who is also a Claire Elizabeth and of the Fraser clan was going out with a guy named James and yes he was a red head too.
I do hope the next book holds my attention better than this one did. It was a bit of a yawn yawn book. Therefore i can only give it a four star rating.

Let's not do the time warp again
Here's a little experiment for you to perform at home. Starve yourself for a couple of days, then cook your most favourite meal and lay it on the table in front of you. Take a fork-full of this food and hold it close to your mouth so you can smell the delicious aroma, then move it away, then close again, then away again. Repeat this about two-dozen times, then throw the whole plate of food in the bin and slap yourself across the face for being so silly. That's pretty much what reading The Fiery Cross is like. It promises so much but delivers so little.

Now, in reviewing this book I'm tempted to write a very snotty article bemoaning its lack of plot, poor character development, confused action scenes, overly longwinded and self-indulgent story... so I will.

Let's at least try for something positive to begin. Hmm... Well, Claire and Jamie are still present and more or less correct, though their relationship has cooled from the fiery and passionate romance of the first couple of books into the comfortable (read boring) life of a middle-aged married couple. Yes, there's the obligatory sex scene every dozen or so chapters (they still seem to go at it like rabbits, even if they're freezing cold, exhausted, dirty, sweaty or anything else that would turn most mere mortals off quicker than a naked picture of Anne Widdicombe), but you can't help but feel the vital spark is missing. They're just not as vibrant and interesting as they used to be. Still, anything's better than Brianna and Roger. Honestly, why do these characters even exist, except to make my brain angry? Brianna is still a whiny irritating brat who elicits about as much sympathy from the reader as a jagged lump of concrete, and Roger is still a personality-free nonentity whose sole purpose is to consistently screw things up at every opporunity, thus proving how super-awesome Jamie is when he is inevitably called in to set things right. Oh, and as usual Jemmy doesn't really do much apart from eat, cry and soil himself at every opportunity (a bit like me after a night out).

The Fiery Cross is a bad book. Not just for what it is, but for what it could have been. Call me fussy if you like, but books about time-travel to a nineteenth century America teetering on the brink of revolution have greater story-telling potential than endless diatribes on dirty nappies, domestic disputes and breast feeding. Like a blind darts player, Ms Gabaldon just keeps missing the point.

Example: About two hundred pages in and still stuck firmly on Day One, I was starting to get the uneasy feeling that something was very wrong with this story indeed. Perhaps the editor had gone on holiday and left a block of wood in his stead, because that's the only way I can explain such a ridiculously long opening sequence. Still, like an abused spouse I endured the pain by constantly telling myself that things would get better, that the book really did care about me and that one day it would realise the error of its ways. I was wrong.

And it really doesn't pick up much after this. Yes, the plot does eventually lead to a vaguely interesting conclusion, but that in no way makes up for the endless chapters of pointless conversations and uninteresting side stories that contribute to its hideously bloated length. If this book was half as long and twice as interesting, then perhaps it would be a reasonably compelling story. As it stands, it's just dull - the literary equivalent of watered-down gruel.

And that's the real problem with The Fiery Cross. It could be... nay, should be so much more than it is. It's almost as if the author has lost sight of what actually made her books good. They're supposed to be rousing tales of adventure, danger, love, hope, friendship and betrayal. In short, they're supposed to provide entertainment - an escape from the dull, tedious grind of our normal lives. Unfortunately, when the book in question features endless chapters of dull, tedious 19th century domestic life, it becomes less about entertainment and more about slogging your way to the end through sheer bloody-minded determination. It's a bit like going to a gourmet restaurant and being served a cheese sandwich - yes, it'll fend off starvation for a few more hours but it's not exactly fun, is it?

And the rest? Well, this may come off as overly picky, but a villain whose only motivation is his unswerving dedication to being a complete bastard doesn't exactly smack of good story-telling. And what's with the minor characters and their endless stream of bizarre medical problems? Honestly, most of these people would be better suited to a circus freak show than a frontier encampment.

Oh well, I suppose in the end these gripes are largely irrelevant anyway. Criticising a Gabaldon book for being overly long and self-indulgent is a bit like criticising Family Guy for its poor continuity - yes, it's arguably a valid point but at the end of the day nobody really cares.

Tread carefully with this one.