I enjoyed the first book in this series quite a lot, which might be why I'm so disappointed in this one. As a romance, this didn't work for me at all. As a continuation in the saga, I'm still interested enough in the overall story to read the next book.

The problem with the romance is that, in addition to there not being any development to Travis/Tyr and Jamie's relationship, there was no real development of their characters. (Basically, the romance is: Tyr decides that it's no longer creepy for him to love/lust after Jamie, makes his move, she goes "huh?" for a scene, they're suddenly engaged.) The mythological Tyr is full of awesomesauce and the Tyr/Travis from the first story had some of that, but the guy in this story was cookie-cutter sweet-protective-hot guy. Jamie, too, was much more lively in the first book. I could overlook the lack of spunk given her trauma, but since even that was only referenced a few times but never shown, she just seemed inconsistent and bland. (She contemplates the warning her counselor gave her about post-traumatic nightmares, but never actually had any, or any other reaction that hinted at trauma.) The secondary characters with stories coming up had actual personalities, which makes me hope that once the focus is off them, Tyr and Jamie will be interesting again.

Also, while I'm somewhat familiar with Norse mythology, the cast of thousands with multiple names confused me a few times, mostly during the infodump worldbuilding scenes. And the extended excerpt from the Younger Edda was kind of odd, but I very rarely enjoy tossing poetry into prose works. (And, please, when you're quoting from the Prose Edda, even if you don't mention the translator, at least don't call it the Poetic Edda... they're not the same thing! And there are better, more readable translations out there than the Brodeur translation available in GoogleBooks, which is what this excerpt is from.) ( )