Tag: Diana Gabaldon

The following might be considered spoilerish, so be ye warned.  Personally, I don’t think it is all that spoilerish because even though it comes late in the book, it’s not really connected to the main storyline – something that makes me even more annoyed because it just didn’t really need to be there at all and it could have been changed in one very small (but significant) way and it would have been okay.

On with the rant.

First off, I’m an Outlander fan. I love the series.  It’s not perfect, but overall, I find the Outlander vortex sucks me in every time.  I gave the last book, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, a B+.  I liked it very very much.

But.

There was one thing which bothered me when I was consuming the book.  Claire operates on a very young slave girl (she’s around 13) with a gynaecological injury.  The girl, Sophronia, was non-violently repeatedly raped (she’s so young and also a slave, it cannot be called seduction as consent here was so far absent it may have been on the moon) by her owner.  She became pregnant. There was a problem during a long labour and the baby died.  Sophronia was left with two fistulae – so both urine and fecal matter was escaping her body via her vagina  (this is still an issue today, especially in poor communities where very young girls give birth without appropriate medical care, but that’s another story). Continue reading