Review: ‘Fantasy Lover’ by Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Dear Reader,

Being trapped in a bedroom with a woman is a grand thing. Being trapped in hundreds of bedrooms over two thousand years isn't. And being cursed into a book as a love-slave for eternity can ruin even a Spartan warrior's day.

As a love-slave, I know everything about women. How to touch them, how to savor them, and most of all, how to pleasure them. But when I was summoned to fulfill Grace Alexander's sexual fantasies, I found the first woman in history who saw me as a man with a tormented past. She alone bothered to take me out of the bedroom and onto the world. She taught me to love again.

But I was not born to love. I was cursed to walk eternity alone. As a general, I had long ago accepted my sentence. Yet now I have found Grace--the one thing my wounded heart cannot survive without. Sure, love can heal all wounds, but can it break a two-thousand-year-old curse?

Julian of Macedon”

(Back cover blurb)

I’ve been wanting to read the Sherrilyn Kenyon books for ages!  While Fantasy Lover is not technically part of the Dark Hunter series, it takes place in the same world, and serves as a prequel. 

Let me start by saying, this story sucked me in quickly and didn’t let go.  (I read it on one sitting.)  I have been a little bored with my romantic heroines lately, but I really liked Grace.  She was smart, kind, flawed and very realistic.  Okay, so it is another book with a sexually inexperienced female with a total sex-god male, but I’ll let that go because the rest of the book was so good. 

Julian also had a surprising amount of depth to him.  He starts as this drop dead gorgeous love-slave, who women are mysteriously drawn to, but there is so much more to him than his looks.  Julian is courageous and fearful, strong and vulnerable.  Kenyon does an excellent job of explaining his complicated history and the relationships between those in the ancient world without churning out pages and pages of info dumps. 

I also love the idea of bringing the Greek mythology to urban fantasy.  I've always had a fascination with the Greeks and it's great to see them given a fresh spin for a modern audience. 

My only criticism of the book has to do with a certain repetitive element in the writing.  Many, many sentences started with the phrase, “Never before had she....”  Why the passive voice?  What’s wrong with “She never...?”  You might think this is a picky point, and you are probably right.  It just jumped out at me.

Overall, I give Fantasy Lover...

Plot - 4 1/2 bookmarks

Character development - 4 bookmarks

Love story - 4 1/2 bookmarks

Sex scenes - 4 bookmarks

Dream cast (otherwise known as who I pictured while reading) - Alexander Skarsgaard (Julian), Katie Featherston (Grace)