Review: very interesting MM romance involving monks and vikings, oh my!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2013
To me this was a very interesting MM romance for a few reasons.  First, the time period.  I admit that the premise of a MM Romance involving Vikings was what drew me to this book.  I am very unfamiliar with the time period the book covers (687-692).  However, as usual Harper Fox did an excellent job in imprinting the perfect image of the setting for her story in my mind.  Is that setting historically accurate?  I do not know, but I did buy her descriptions of the area and customs of that time.Second, I loved the enemies to lovers story between Cai and Fen.  The story is told from Cai's POV so perhaps we get to know him better.  BUT I loved the cocky viking that is Fen.  He had some lines that had me laughing because of his harmless arrogance.  Their love story is somewhat slow.  Fen is not introduced until about 15% thru the book.  And they get to know each other slowly, as Fen is recovering.  That is not to say that this story is slow as there are many other things that are going on at the same time their romance is developing.Another thing that I found interesting in this book was the religious aspect of it.  Cai is a Christian monk so throughout the book religion is an ongoing theme.  I am more of a spiritual person rather than religious and the religious themes in the book left me thoughtful.  Not because the book is preachy in any way.  At least I didn't feel like it was.  However, I did think that perhaps a deeply religious person may take issue with some of the ideas mentioned.Here are some of the reservations I had with this book:*First the dialogue felt a bit modern.  However, I do realize that this was probably the author's choice to make the book more readable.  *Second, I found just a bit hard to believe Fen's change in loyalties.  I just think that this was a very hard thing to come to grips with and perhaps because we don't get to see Fen's POV we don't get to see in depth his inner turmoil regarding this.* Homosexuality didn't seem to be frowned upon by the britons, vikings and just a bit by the monks.  I am going to go with a suspension of disbelief on this one.