Review:

It's hard to do justice to the concept of LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE -- I will leave it at this: it involves the God of Love, or one, at any rate, and a wonderfully complicated set of realities, told with a keen eye for the nuances of emotion and crazy-wonderful language.

Look at some of these emotional complexities:

He tipped his head a degree to one side with the missed timing of someone who's been exhaustively coached, though Valkrie fancied he deliberately got it wrong.

His dark minotaur eyes looked at me, hard and calculating for an instant, and he drew and let out a breath in a very measured way, but didn't finish.

I felt that I could do anything I wanted and he'd never turn to me with the cold face that lets you know you've gone too far and fallen off the invisible pedestal you never knew you were on.

It's all just terrific and the language is fabulous. If I had any qualms, it would be that there's a sudden proliferation of characters somewhere around the three-quarters mark that gets a tad confusing. But the ending is satisfying and wraps them all up well.

I think younger or unsophisticated readers may not like this as much as they could, but writers and those with sense finely attuned to the fantastic will like this. A lot.