Review: Until Forever, by Johanna Lindsey

• Title:  Until Forever
• Author:  Johanna Lindsey
• Series:  N/A
• Genre:  Adult, Historical Fantasy/Romance
• Category:  Time-Travel, Norse Gods, Magic, Viking
• Length:  400 Pages
• Website:  http://johannalindsey.wordpress.com/

Summary:  Roseleen White is a college professor with a passion for the Medieval and the artifacts of that era.  After years of coveting one particular sword, she is finally able to locate and procure the relic.  Called the Blooddrinker’s Curse, her new Scandinavian weapon is the treasure of her collection.

Then one day, as Rose is holding her precious sword, she inadvertently summons the man who owned it.  Out of nowhere, Thorn Blooddrinker appears in her life.  Thinking someone is playing a joke on her, she sends him away.  But the next time she holds the sword, it happens again.  She eventually has to accept the truth that the curse was real.  Thorn is imprisoned by the power of the sword, and should it be held in the hands of any woman, he can be summoned, controlled, and banished at her whim.

Thorn likes Rose though, so he isn’t disturbed by her summons.  Instead, he pours on the sex appeal and tries to claim her passion and virginity.  He wants her to like and trust him also, because he is hopeful that she will allow him to travel through time.  The sword gives him that power, but only if Rose goes with him.  No other previous summoner had allowed him this opportunity.

Being a historian, Rose is more than willing to see the past that she has dedicated her life to studying.  She will be able to see events unfold with her own eyes, and she may even be able to meet some of the most important people in history.  The trip is exciting, but when they return to future, they discover that the world is not the same place they left.  Somehow, their brief furlough in the past has completely changed the future.

Without knowing exactly where they made their mistakes, returning to the past is their only choice.  And if it takes trial and error over multiple trips, they’ll do what has to be done.  The time together is good for their blossoming romance, but what will happen when Rose realizes that the only way to free her lover from his captivity is to lose him forever?

Review:  It is truly a mystery to me that this author’s writing style and my taste in reading material can be a perfect match one day and then polar opposites the next.  I LOVED her Viking Series, so when I discovered that she had written a separate time-travel romance with a Viking hero, I had it downloaded to my Kindle within minutes.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the other series.

Remember the Back to the Future movie series?  Marty McFly travels back in time and accidentally changes history.  When he returns to the future, nothing is as it should be because his actions changed the space-time continuum and put the world on a different trajectory.  In order to put his world right again, he has to travel back in time and fix his mess.  Until Forever is the exact same story with different characters.

I kept humming the Back to the Future soundtrack while reading this story,  which was awfully annoying.  But as far as the book is concerned, I was mostly disappointed that the time travel did not involve Viking history or settings at all.  Thorn chose to go back to an English war, not to his home.  Why would I want to read a Viking time-travel book that has nothing to do with Vikings or their history?  The way this book was written, Thorn being a Viking was completely inconsequential.  But this was not the worst part about his choice not to travel to his own past.  The worst part was that he could have broken the curse entirely if he had gone back to kill the witch who cursed him before she had the chance to do it.  Then he could have had his entire life back.  His decision not to do that was completely illogical.

Thorn’s curse didn’t make much sense either.  In the book synopsis, Thorn is trapped in his sword until summoned by a woman (like a genie in a lamp.)  But in the actual book, Thorn is in Valhalla in between summons.  Valhalla is hardly a curse for a Viking, it was the goal of that culture to be rewarded with Valhalla in the afterlife.  And even though hundreds of years could pass between summons, only a few days pass in Valhalla.  So in his thousand years of captivity, it was a fraction of that time for him.  Doesn’t seem like much of a curse, does it?

I could probably list another dozen things that were wrong with this story, but I’ll spare you from more of my ranting.  The only saving grace was that Thorn and Rose were solid characters.  Bottom line: Good characters, severely botched plot lines, not recommended.  If you want a good Viking romance, try her Viking Series that includes Fires of Winter, Hearts Aflame, and Surrender My Love (Fires of Winter is the best of the three.)  It isn’t a time-travel series, but the story construction is so much better.