Review: Her Alpha Viking by Sheryl Nantus

Her Alpha Viking by Sheryl Nantus
Published by: Entangled Teen on August 27, 2018
Genre: Romance
Source: NetGalley
Book Details
Rating: ★★½

Some loves are bigger than this world…

Former soldier Erik Harrison is a dead man walking. The sole survivor of an ambush, the guilt of losing his friends is crushing. He questions his own sanity, remembering the vision he saw as he was dying –– a battle angel come to collect his friends' souls.

Valkyrie Brenna Lund doesn't know why she failed in her duty to reap Erik's soul on the battlefield. He deserves his place with the other mighty warriors in Valhalla, and if she wants to return home, she has to kill him.

There are consequences for betraying the gods. But the closer Brenna and Erik become, the more they both want to risk everything for a future together. If only an immortal hunter weren’t sent to kill them both.

This fantasy book didn’t feel like a fantasy

I looked at that cover, read that synopsis, and had expectations. I envisioned an epic fantasy romance with Norse mythology. What I got… was pretty much a contemporary book.

You can easily strip out all the Norse stuff and have the exact same story. It’s basically about a cage fighter who’s also a veteran who winds up with this girl and circumstances happen to cause them to go on the run together. They meet up with some other veterans, have a road trip, and romance follows. It completely reads like a contemporary romance with a small amount of thriller (on the run) stuff sprinkled in. That just wasn’t what I expected at all. I expected a fantasy romance and it didn’t read like one. Even the on the run stuff was very contemporary — using social media and websites to plant false leads.

So in that sense it wasn’t necessarily a bad book, it just deviated completely from my expectations. It didn’t feel like a fantasy at all except they talked about Valkyries occasionally.

This was a huge disappointment for me… Maybe just because I really like the cover and I had so many hopes and dreams for this book! I mean, how good does a Norse mythology fantasy sound?? Ugh. Upset.

Two other smaller things of note:

1. It was a little bit cheesy. Kind of a “love conquers all” type thing. I love a good romance but sometimes the wording can just tip it over from “awesome romance” to “cheesy romance”. This was on the cheese side.

2. They kept acting like being on the run was this huge deal and they were putting “so many lives at risk”, but it was a little hard to take it seriously when we didn’t see the person chasing them for like 95% of the book. It was just hard to feel really invested in how big of a deal it was when the threat was practically invisible.

Anyway if you like the sound of this book with all the fantasy elements stripped away, then go for it. It is kind of a fun contemporary romance and I loved the cast of characters they hooked up with. That was probably my favourite part of the book. It just sucked that I went into this book expecting a fantasy and I feel like it wasn’t one at all. That really messed with my enjoyment.