I realize I skipped over the volume before this, which was Ancient China. I think that one was the most dry so far, but still a good read.
So I finally got around to reading the Viking book, because one set in "Shogun's Japan" just came out.
I have mixed feelings on this.
It's a great read. I learned a lot. I like how she ends several chapters with what happened to the person after the chapter ended. The balance of characters was good.
My biggest problem is that this author completely ignored the theme of this series. All the others took place over the course of ONE 24-hour time period. These chapters are all over the place, so this is not "a day in the life of the people who lived there," as the cover says. Some of these chapters are years apart! There is no real connect to any of them. A few have linked characters, which I like, but the Rome book especially showed how that should be done. This wasn't like that. I get that the author wanted to be in different locations, as the Viking World is far larger than Rome or Athens, but why ignore the hour theme? The other authors made the hour part of the story. She doesn't.
All in all, this is an excellent book on Vikings and I loved aspects of it, but I would really like to know both why the author felt she was too good to keep to the point of the series and why the makers of this series even let her do that in the first place. It's the worst book in the series for that reason.
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