A middle-aged mousy woman is conveniently a professor of history with a sabbatical to build a real Viking longship despite being completely passive in pretty much all aspects of her life. Geirolf has a convenient hankering for middle-aged, mousy women (an odd trait to find in a Viking, you have to admit). A convenient artifact provides magical fluency in English. Unfortunately, the author threw way too many convenient circumstances into the plot to make it stick for me. I suppose it had potential for an interesting story with a Viking displaced into modern times and finding romance with a modern woman. I'm not sure why I had hopes for this book. The romance genre is so easy to ridicule and books such as this do it a disservice. I could write an essay about why this book didn't work for me, but you get the drift. And don't even get me started on the chapter break titles (that's right - every chapter BREAK had a title - usually involving an awful pun). The awful dialogue, the unbelievable 'motivations' and the horrendously paper-thin supporting cast all succeeded in infuriating me, yanking me out of the story because I couldn't suspend my disbelief and invest in these characters as living creations. Meredith and Geirolf are perfectly suited for one another, in that they are both remarkably idiotic throughout this book. I can even cope with magical elements/destinies/soulmates, etc. I can cope with plot contrivances that would never happen in real life. I can forgive a lot of crimes in fluffy romance books. I bought her a copy of The Last Viking all for herself and she gamely embraced her first ever romance novel and insisted I read it too. My cynical flatmate frequently delights in laughing at the books I read and a few months back, she stumbled across Sandra Hill's works and became fixated. I came very close to awarding The Last Viking two whole stars, because to be fair to the book, it brought a lot of joy to my life, just not in the way the author probably intended.
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