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The Outlander by Gil Adamson
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Into the Wild
A Review by Ron Charles

Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page: Men with hounds are chasing a young woman through the woods at night. Nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton has murdered her husband and now, still wearing a black mourning dress made from curtains, she's running from her brothers-in-law, massive, red-headed twins with rifles across their backs.

Welcome to The Outlander, an absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple of television dramas and horror films (the dark street, those panicked backward glances, that plaintive cry: "Oh, why did I wear these heels?!"). But Gil is short for Gillian, and her strange and complicated heroine has nothing in common with Hollywood's worn-out damsels in distress.

For almost 400 pages, we follow "the widow's peculiar trajectory into the wild. The route like a skittering...
 
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