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My husband and I were in Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago. He was browsing the sci-fi section, and I was in�where else?�the romance section. Eventually, my husband found his way back to me and began idly looking at titles. A few minutes later, he tapped me on the shoulder and held a book out to me. �You must read this. It looks awesomely cheesy!� I never thought the day would come when my husband would actually pick out a trashy romance novel for me to read, but, sure enough, I found myself holding a copy of Viking Unchained by Sandra Hill. And he was right; it was cheesy.
The book begins in 11th century Baghdad, where Viking warrior Thorfinn Haraldsson is searching for his son, Miklof. Finn�s wife, Luta, had left him some months earlier, taking their son with her as she ran off with her new lover. Their ship allegedly went down in a storm, but Finn heard a rumor that a woman and child matching their descriptions had been sighted in Baghdad. While in the Iraqi city, Finn gets into a fight (he is a Viking, after all). The next thing he knows, he�s surrounded by a team of modern-day U.S. Navy SEALS. (Yeah, I didn�t get it, either, but bear with me.)
Finn winds up traveling back to the States, where he meets Lydia Denton. Lydia�s husband, Dave, was a SEAL who was killed in battle�and he just so happened to look almost exactly like Finn. Lydia has a son, Michael, who looks�wait for it�just like Finn�s lost son, Miklof. Amid all of this mistaken identity, Lydia and Finn begin to fall for each other. But, as always, there are obstacles. Lydia has a hard time separating Finn from his lookalike, Dave, and Finn finds it difficult to trust women after his wife left him�er�centuries earlier.
I tend to have a high standard for time-travel novels, having read the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. And, sadly, Sandra Hill is no Diana Gabaldon. The time-travel aspect of the book is totally glossed over�with no explanation how or why, other than a brief mention that it �runs in Finn�s family.� Yeah, there are something like 40 Haraldssons hanging out in the modern-day United States. Some have assimilated very well, while others seem to have seen The Thirteenth Warrior one too many times.
I simply didn�t find any of the characters�even Lydia�to be engaging. I did like Finn, or at least his affection for and loyalty to his son, but that�s about it. I couldn�t care less whether or not Lydia found love again, or if Finn�s time traveling sister-in-law was a �harpy.�
The one thing I really hated, though, was the way that Hill would start out most paragraphs. She�d give them titles�lame little quips like �I love a man in uniform�but I love him out of it more.� If she wanted to have titles, titling the chapters would have worked much better.
Hill attempted to insert some suspense into the story, but that didn�t work very well, either. The so-called villain is an Iraqi man who�s sworn revenge on Dave�s family because he feels that Dave was responsible for the deaths of his wife and child. The character is such a stereotype of the �Jihadi/Evil Muslim� that even I found it offensive�and I�m one of the least PC people around. To make matters worse, he only shows up in three scenes�and one of those is his death scene. Hill would have been much better off if she�d paid more attention to the plot rather than describing Finn and his family�s Viking ways.
Basically, the only things that Hill got right were the love scenes. Those were very hot indeed�pretty much the way one would imagine that sex with a Viking would be.
All in all, I was very disappointed in this novel, which was too bad, since I really wanted to like it. How could you go wrong with Vikings and Navy SEALs? Well, read Viking Unchained, and you�ll find out.
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