Michelle Styles Archives - Proud Book Reviews

December 16, 2019February 5, 2021

A Deal with Her Rebel Viking – Michelle Styles

Welcome back everyone, I’m back into the historical romances (thank you Michelle Styles for asking me to review this for you!) and this one I do need to say is the last one for the year.

You could probably tell by my rating, but I really loved this one!

Although I don’t know how accurate the interactions were between characters for the time it’s set in, I still loved the banter between Ansithe and Moir. It had me chuckling quite a few times, especially when the other characters got involved.

With both Ansithe’s sisters, some of Moir’s felag and the extras, that joined the story a little later on, worked and schemed to get them together it seemed pretty obvious that everything would work out. Yet, without the trust that Moir worked hard to earn the end would never have happened as it did.

In terms of character development, we had Ansithe gain some self-confidence, both her sisters seemed to grow emotionally, Moir learnt how to plan for and enjoy the future and Bajtr grew in maturity from an adolescent into a man. Ansithe and Moir were the central focus of the book, yet Michelle still had time to let us experience the development of other characters while still adding value to the story.

Throughout the book there was a good balance of drama, romance, strategy, espionage and action that it felt like there was almost always something to pay attention to. By changing up what that focus was, Michelle was able to give me a break, so I didn’t get bored without losing my attention.

When I got to the last chapter (or was it second last chapter?) I hated having to put the book down to have to go to work. While also practically jumping up and down in nervous excitement to see how Ansithe’s and Moir’s relationship had developed over the course of the book. To say I loved the Moir’s final actions is an understatement.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, next week I will be reviewing my last book for the year, Against All Odds by Craig Challen and Dr Richard Harris.

March 18, 2019February 5, 2021

Summer of the Viking – Michelle Styles

Welcome back everyone, I hope you enjoyed last week’s tour of No Place Like Home from our returning author of Second Chance at the Ranch. This week’s review was brought to me by Michelle Styles.

She was so thankful of all the support you have given her from my review of Sent as the Vikings Bride (which BTW is still getting a few hits a day! How amazing is that?!) that she offered me my choice of any of her other novels to also get a free copy of. And I chose this one because it sounded interesting and I wanted another Viking fix.

Writing Style

So, I found the writing style to be a little less intricate than her newest novel. I don’t know if this is because this one was an older one or not, but I did feel there was a little bit of a difference compared to what I read in Sent as the Vikings Bride.

It did grab my attention and kept me involved when I was starting to feel stressed about my study. I was worried coz I started another book and I wasn’t really into it, so being able to take the break from that book to read this one; which I knew I’d enjoy; was a really good feeling.

Michelle continued her enjoyable style with a character driven story steeped in history that spans the Viking countries, and what we now know as Great Britain. What was really cool about this for me was that it featured Northumbria, which is the area my family originally came from before immigrating to Australia.

I really enjoyed reading even a tiny little bit of history from that corner of the country knowing my family history.

Initial Thoughts

My initial thoughts of this was that again, I wasn’t too sure who was who at the start of the book. After experiencing that again, I’m thinking this is just the way Michelle sets up her stories. But I do find it a little bit confusing trying to figure out who’s who until it settles down.

My only other big kinda thought at the start was that Michelle talked about the various different Northmen nations. Like when she referred to one country as Viken, it made me think that maybe we broadly apply the term “Viking” to all people from the Scandinavian countries.

And this thought led me to reflect on how we now, and even then, broadly applied our experiences of a few individuals to an entire nation. Or in some cases continent. And these can be both positive or negative. But it made me reflect on how often I might do this and the effect it might have on my interactions with those around me.

Final Thoughts

My final thoughts of this book when I first finished it was that it was the polar opposite of Sent as the Vikings Bride. In that one, the girl went to the guy, the guy was the landowner, the girl was the hero (or at least that’s how I took it). Whereas, in this one, the guy went to the girl, the girl was the landowner and the guy was the hero.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the story. Because I did. It was just something that I noticed and made me pause. But in that pause, I reminded myself that there are only so many variations of those catalysts that an author can come up with.

Something that I think was done subtly that I really liked, was how domestic violence was handled in those times. I know historically that we probably didn’t do much. But Michelle tackled this in such a positive way. She talked about how people can pretend like everything is ok when it’s not, how you can be almost brainwashed into thinking that person gives you everything when in actual fact, they are the one causing more damage. And even how the people close to them wish they had have seen it happening in order to help them.

From this perspective I really liked that it was spoken about, without being overly confronting for the readers.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, next week I will be reviewing Mr One Night Stand by another return author, Rachael Stewart.

Author Bio

Born and raised near San Francisco Califorinia, Michelle Styles currently lives a few miles south of Hadrian’s Wall with her husband, three children and menagerie of pets. An avid reader, she became hooked on historical romance when she discovered Georgette Heyer, Anya Seton and Victoria Holt in her school’s library. Michelle enjoys writing stories in a wide range of time periods including Roman, Viking, Regency and early Victorian.

December 24, 2018January 10, 2021

Sent as the Vikings Bride – Michelle Styles

Welcome back everyone, I hope you enjoyed last week’s “Three Nights with a Rock Star” and are looking forward to the big jump back to the 9^th Century in this weeks book. This week’s book came to me from the author contacting me to see if I’d be interested in reading and reviewing her book. And I’m glad I said yes because I’m due for my fix of Vikings and this is right up that alley.

We start off this book with Gunnar and his best friend at Jul (I think this is kind of like our modern day New Years Eve for vikings?) where he’s just been given land. Fast forward almost a year and we are now with Ragnhild (Ragn) and her sister Svana. I was a little confused at this point who was who, I don’t know if that’s because I was tired when I started reading this book or whether the writing wasn’t very clear but it only took a couple of pages for me to figure out what was going on. Ragn and Svana are on a boat on their way to what I gathered to be either Iceland, Greenland or Scotland from their viking homeland, fleeing from Ragn’s brother in law who murdered her husband and destroyed her lands. Without even getting anywhere in the book there was already so much drama and so many possibilities for things to go wrong, go right, twist to happen for it all to sort itself out.

Some of the things I really enjoyed about this book was that even though Ragn and Gunnar obviously like each other they are both super scared to admit it, they are scared to relinquish control of their lives to anyone else and they are both burned by previous relationships making this all the harder. I feel like with most relationships if someone has been burned before it’s only one of them, not both. So this was a difference that I thought was really well written and made you really feel for the other character as the one who we’re following at the time struggles to figure out and accept their own feelings and history.

Svana on the other hand started the book with epileptic fits, a lazy eye, a limp and A LOT of fears that were driving her behaviours. To me it feels so stupid that people should fear her because of these unfortunate “defects” that she can’t help. In modern day epilepsy is treated with medication (I’ve known a few people with this and it’s managed), a lazy eye if caught early can be trained to be normal (I’ve experienced this myself), a limp that could have been caused by anything, including running for her life. And of course her fears. Who wouldn’t fear dogs when they’ve been hunted down by them? Who wouldn’t fear someone fearing them when it’s always resulted in being hit or punished in the past? To read how Gunnar and others worked together to cure her fears and slowly work on her other issues was amazing. The fact that her epilepsy slowly calmed down and went away speaks to the truth of them being caused by a head injury not her being a witch says it all for how ignorant people could be back then which makes me super happy to be in a world with less fear and judgement. I’m not saying that the world is without fear or judgement, but I think it’s largely better than it has been throughout history.

To wrap things up we got an epic display of political moves, outsmarting each other, planning ahead and counter-planning ahead. To have the trust of those around you to do what they can to protect each other, to live for each other and most of all to fight for each other is amazing. It was definitely hard won trust for a few people and grudging respect from others but they got there and ended up making the perfect team that achieved exactly what you set out to do. And of course there was a happy ending for the whole family that made me really happy and immediately made me want to jump into another Michelle Styles novel! Hopefully you’ll see another one of her books come up in the new year.

Thankyou for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, next week I will be reviewing “Stygian” by Sherrilyn Kenyon, and don’t forget to read on down for a quick author bio.