The Fires of Winter - Johanna Lindsey (Haadrad Viking Family #1)

I recently looked at my 2017 reading challenge in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads and realized that if I didn't get moving, I was going to be in very, very big trouble.  Here's the thing: I was tearing through that challenge at the beginning of the year.  But in doing so, I kind of...read all of the categories I was looking forward to.   Which left me with the "dregs" of categories I don't have much interest in or have downright been dreading reading for the end of the year.  Sigh.  Nevertheless, I had to get to it, so I decided to go for the "Viking romance" category I still had pending.

Much like sheikh romance books, Viking romance books seem to have a theme of being very rapey.  This is somewhat because this is what Vikings did.  They pillaged and plundered and raped and ravaged.  Not amongst their own people, where rape was a very, very serious crime, but Viking romances typically involve a young woman from the British Isles being swept away by a marauder and then falling desperately in love with him after her "traitorous body" responds to his ravishments.

Ich.

But there didn't appear to be any escaping it, and so I took on Fires of Winter.  The heroine here is a Celtic woman named Brenna, who was basically allowed to act like a boy for much of her young life and goes around in boys' clothes and carrying a sword.  You would think Brenna would be all about the #gurlpower, but the book starts with her discovering a man raping a woman and deciding it's okay as long as the rapist marries his victim.  This pretty astutely sums up Brenna's outlook for the book.  She's supposed to be married to a Viking in order to cement some sort of peace treaty, but the Viking's father, Anselem--with whom the deal was struck--reneges and raids her home as a form of vengeance; the prospective groom, unaware that he even was a prospective groom, doesn't show up until later, when Brenna is already ensconced in his house as a slave gift from the aforementioned raiding father.  Brenna, unlike all of the other women in her town, manages to escaped being raped in the journey to Norway, because of course her virginity must be preserved so "hero" Garrick can divest her of it.

Garrick is awful.  He's known as the "Hardhearted" because he doesn't like women after a former lover scorned him, but we're supposed to see through his tough exterior to a warm and cushy center.  Not so much.  Repeatedly raping the heroine doesn't really get very far, and Lindsey doesn't even attempt to mitigate the act with any "traitorous body" nonsense (which is the traditional out in this type of book, the 1980s bodice-ripper--"she liked it and so it's okay in the end") until pretty far into the book.  And even then, Brenna returns to her philosophy of that it's not wrong that Garrick is raping her, it's wrong that he's raping her and refusing to marry her after.  Why does he refuse to marry her?  Because she's a slave, but he can't free her, because then he wouldn't be able to rape her!  Obviously.

BUT!  Here is the thing.  Horrible people doing horrible things does not necessarily a bad book make, as my recent reading experience of The Bronze Horseman goes to show.  What actually made this a bad book was the writing.  Brenna was not a heroine I could root for; her actions in the beginning of the book, excusing a rapist even though she protests to hate rape, set me against her from the start, and it wasn't an upward path from there.  Despite saying she will never be dominated by a Viking, she finds herself basting the hindquarters of animals pretty quickly and cleaning up a room she trashes because Garrick says he won't feed her until she does.  She is of the foot-stamping, hair-tossing variety of woman who everyone happens to love, or at least want, at first sight and who, despite being "the best" warrior, manages to get her ass handed to her at every turning point.  She screeches and flails and is just generally so annoying that I wouldn't have minded if she fell into a fjord and drowned.  Garrick, though a terrible person, actually fit the book better, because his actions were essentially what I expected of this variety of character in this time and place.  I actually kind of appreciated that Lindsey didn't make him the raider who had stolen Brenna away, because that was actually something a little different.  But despite having an intellectual acknowledgement of Garrick and his motivations, I still couldn't feel strongly for him in any direction because Lindsey's writing is just flat.  No emotion, no spark, no fury, no passion.  Nada.

Looking at other reviews of the book now, I see I probably could have spared myself the time if I had realized Nenia from Readasaurus Reviews (and also admin of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group) had already read and reviewed this.  But still, the library didn't have anything available on Kindle and this was relatively inexpensive, and I don't think most other Viking romances would have any better, so I'm just going to move on.

1.5 stars out of 5.