Mary is pushed out of the house into the arms of the first man who shows interest, hitched to a wagon-train heading west, and dumped into a tiny cabin in the woods, where she gives birth to a sickly child who almost immediately dies. How many women were there, one wonders, in something like Mary’s situation in Canada’s early days? Her father was an Anglican minister in the East who lost his faith and his job and hit the bottle after his wife died of lupus. Mary is fleeing from her husband’s two brothers, who do not take kindly to her having shot their closest kin in the thigh and watched him bleed to death. The year is 1903, the location somewhere in the Crowsnest Pass region of the Rockies. Shades of another well-known book: Atwood’s Alias Grace, though the setting and speed of Adamson’s tale are quite different from the claustrophobia of Atwood’s.

Adamson’s outlander is Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old “widow by her own hand” – in other words, a murderess on the lam. The hero of Gil Adamson’s book is also a woman, and there’s a little bit of hot sex in her story (some cold sex, too – hey, it’s Canadian), but there the resemblance to Gabaldon’s book ends. What was Gil Adamson thinking when she titled her novel The Outlander? What was Anansi thinking? After all, that’s the name of the first book in Diana Gabaldon’s wildly successful time-travel series that spirits a woman from 1945 London back to 1743 Scotland, where she experiences hot sex.Ĭome to think of it, maybe that’s exactly what they were thinking.

The outlander by gil adamson