Dragonfly in Amber; Voyager; and Drums of Autumn (Diana Gabaldon)

These books are immensely trashy, filled with a slightly sickening attitidue towards love and romance, and a distastefully homophobic world view. Yet I'm kind of addicted to the time-travel premise, despite doubts that Gabaldon's picture of the world 200 years ago is in any way accurate.

In these books, the eternally passion-struck Claire and Jamie travel to France and then to America. In the third, their daughter Brianna and her fiance travel through time to find her parents, and there are rapes, pregnancies, and lots of sickening declarations of love. (This is why romance as a genre is really not for me.)

As this series progresses, the author seems to be becoming more and more fond of the idea that men exist to take care of and to protect women, and even if women think they're independent, secretly they love it when a man comes striding in to protect their honour. Gag. I don't think I'm going to read any more of these - they leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

Gabaldon is well-known for writing romance novels, although I hear that she dislikes the label. I don't know why - although Outlander involves time travel (briefly), and historical aspects, it revolves chiefly around the romance of Claire and Jamie in 18th century Scotland.

Claire travels several hundred years into the past through a stone circle. She seems relatively undisturbed about this occurrence, which irritated me. She very swiftly settles down, and seems to forget entirely her husband whom she has left behind in the future. She meets Jamie when he saves her from being raped and she nurses him from a bullet wound. They progress to madly having sex everywhere, at anytime of day, and having what I found to be a strangely abusive relationship with each other.

I enjoyed the pace of this novel, but various elements of the characters were most unrealistic - Claire's happily settling down in the past, for example. I found the scene where Jamie beats Claire extremely off-putting, and his nickname for her - "Sassenach" - began to drive me crazy about halfway through the book.

I enjoyed the rollicking haphazardness of the story though, and I'll be reading one or two of the sequels to see if the characterisation improves. I'd say this was a 3 out of 5, occasionally verging on a 2.

The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

I had heard this book mentioned by others many times before reading it myself, but didn't know much about it. While it involves time travel, I wouldn't class it as science fiction. It's a love story, a tale that muses on connections and destiny, and the intricate ways in which we tie our lives to other people's.

Henry has a genetic disorder which causes him to uncontrollably travel in time, generally to important moments in his past or future. He spends time with his younger self, glimpses his future home, and when he is in his early twenties, he meets Clare, who says she has known him her entire life. When Henry is in his forties, he travels back in time and begins to regularly meet with Clare, who is six years old.

The Time Traveller's Wife charts Henry and Clare's relationship over the years, and it's a beautiful and very moving story. I felt so intimately connected to these characters, and the ending was rather heart-rending. A four out of five book - I loved it.