I am running late today and thought I had done this. Sorry! Today we will have a guest post by our own Harlequin Insider Michelle Styles (so she is used to me running late 😉 ).
If you haven’t already, go read Lawson’s review on Taken by the Viking. There are a couple of things in the review I want to talk about later but for how we shall focus on this…
It’s rather odd though that the first one I read is about Vikings. I had a bad experience with a Viking romance some years ago and haven’t really liked them since. I think Michelle Styles has made me change my mind about that though.
I think that says a lot, as does her coming over yesterday and leaving with Michelle’s next HH as well as another HH or two. 😉
We will have a guest post from Michelle today at 11 am but until then you can read not one but two excerpts from her.
Taken by the Viking excerpt can be read here.
and
Viking Warrior, Unwilling Wife, which was released this month by Mills & Boone, can be read here. I am not sure if a US date has been set yet but I will double check.
So going back to what Lawson said, what is your take on Viking romances? What have you read before and do you like them?
Right, I know what Lawson means about SOME Viking romances not being very good. Before I started writing Taken, I had a long conversation with my sister about Viking Romances. My sister loves Norway. She went to Norwegian language camp as a teenager in Minnesota (partly because then she did not need a flashlight but that is another story). She ended up going to university at the University of Oslo and speaks fluent Norwegian. She commented on how angry some Viking romances made her, because they really did not depict Vikings in what she considered to be the appropriate light and if I was going to write one, I needed to do my research. She gave me a reading list…
Luckily for me, when my sister read Taken, she enjoyed it. And I am very pleased that Lawson enjoyed it as well. Fingers crossed that she likes VWUW.
I do not know when my next book is coming out in the NA market. And I don’t know which one it will be. There are a couple more Romans, and in September, the sequel to A Christmas Wedding Wager comes out in the UK as well –An Impulsive Debutante. It features Lottie Charlton who was a sort of Mean Girl in ACWW but became one of my favourite heroines.(Sybil do you want the excerpt for this?) BUT, Amazon.ca does carry the entire M&B line. I use Amazon.com to get some of the HH releases before they are released in the UK…
Scheduling is really a Black Art and beyond my paygrade. I do know that they do respond to readers’ requests…
Oh I would love to put up an excerpt! We should have a few random book alerts and general HH posts after we finish scheduling the 9am and 11am posts ;).
And well just in general we LOVE to post excerpts and still have some from April to put up.
Michelle, it was great. The one Viking romance that I had read (that turned me off to them) was a sort of “I’m Viking male, you little woman, do what I say and be my sex slave” sort of attitude was just horrible.
Yours, though, was warm, realistic and a great read. And it definitely made me want to read the next one to see more court intrigue and dashing Vikings. 😉
OK but really as much as I didn’t ‘like’ Coulter’s vikings (eek I may have just misspelled her name but I am too lazy to go look)… the whole I am viking male you lil woman… ‘seems’ like that would be pretty historically correct.
No?
LOL I have to admit I have never looked into it.