Leisure, $5.99, ISBN 0-8439-4984-8
Historical Romance, 2002
It is just me or have Sandra Hill’s dialogues deteriorated so badly recently that her brand of comedy is now painful rather than funny? After finishing My Fair Viking, I have to reread a few old Sandra Hill funnies to check and see.
This one isn’t stupid as much as it is just off. This story revolves around our tomboy heroine Tyra, Viking Valkyrie-wannabe (but actually, all she needs is to lose that hymen and she’ll be a sweet, docile woman, be rest assured) and the healer Adam she forcefully abducts to heal her ailing father.
Needless to say, the other Vikings, pirates, and other secondary characters soon lose what little of their personalities and become nothing more than toggle-witted cheerleaders just wanting to see our lovebirds shag. Tyra’s sisters, who can’t marry unless Tyra marries first, plot and make lists that will be prominently published in Cosmo and Seventeen – if Ms Hill thinks that she’s channeling Sex in the Viking Medieval City, sorry, it’s more of a Valkyrie McBeal here. Everyone just wants to see our two main characters have sex. Shag, shag, shag! I feel like a member of the audience in a sex show already.
Adam is a sexist pig, but he’s a tenth century dude, so I guess I can make allowances for his behavior. Tyra, however, is a shrew who has no idea when to stop saying no. The story soon drags into a most tedious battle of sulks and miscommunication sets in like rigor mortis.
Oh, and did I mention the really bad dialogues? It is one thing to try to be funny, but Sandra Hill seems to be tossing bad one-liners like Lauren Graham on Prozac. If you are a stickler for historical accuracy, well, just be prepared when these tenth century people start to display their visionary abilities with words and phrases like “ego”, “sex knowledge”, “barmy”, and “bloody hell”. Probably they are just women’s magazine editorial members in the making.
Inane dialogues, deliberately cutesy characters with no thought in their head apart from seeing the lovebirds wedded and shagged, a hero in permanent sexual harassment mode, and a heroine in an overlong, immature PMS tantrum – come to think of it, this book isn’t just annoying, it annoys the kittens out of me.
