Beloved Enemy

I enjoyed this book very much. The characters are lively and engaging, the writing clear and simple without a lot of extraneous plot (no blackmail, betrayal, cheating, etc.), and the romance develops naturally and believably. From childhood best friends to political enemies to lovers, Kjeld and Dafried keep your attention and affection all the way through. The ending is unrealistically happy, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The world needs more happy endings.
Set against the background of Rome’s takeover of the surrounding Germanic tribes, there weren’t a lot of real life happy endings. But Ms. Noble obviously did her homework on the subject. There’s a great deal here that I didn’t know going in about Roman tactics and Gladiator culture, but it all checks out. That’s realism enough. Overlaying it with a lovely romance adds a bright spot to an otherwise dark and terrifying period of history (if you’re on the Germanic side).

An interesting and engaging story about two boys who share an extremely tight bond as boys, get seperated and meet up unexpectetly and under severe circumstances as adults again. Finally they also find out that their love for each other which had never left them has grown into a very real sexual attraction, too.
The story is written in a fluid style with an intriguing plot that keeps you reading on and on til you're through. The author is able to convey that very special relationship between two men that grows from a brotherly love to both of them realising they're also in love with each other. Another thing that drew me to that story is a carefully researched trip back in time to where the Roman Empire was at its hight. You learn a lot about what happened in the arena of the colliseum.
So if you want to read a story that combines adventure, history and true love between two guys all mixed up within a good plot you shouldn't miss reading \"Beloved Enemy\"!

I was drawn into the story from the beginning. When they were kids, Kjeld and Dafried were close friends. Then Kjeld was taken away from his family to be raised as a Roman in ancient Rome.
I wanted to know what happened ten years later, and I wasn't disappointed. As grown men, they meet under dangerous circumstances, and there are twists and even more complications before the friends can make up for the lost time and confess their love to each other.
I only wish the author had described their growing love relationship in greater detail. It would have been nice to have a glimpse into the future of Kjeld and Dafried. I can recommend this historical tale.

Repetitive. I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed in the potential of a story before. The synopsis was engaging, the excerpt gripping, but the execution so repetitive and banal that I found myself figuratively banging my head against a brick wall.
Let me start off by saying what I liked: Kjeld was a likeable caring sort—I found Defried somewhat of a brat as a child but rather charming as an adult. I enjoyed the concept. Not many authors dare tackle stories—at least in gay fiction—that drag you back in time. I also appreciated the research that went into the world building and the moments where tenderness and emotion was conveyed spectacularly between the two men.
What I could have done w/o: I kept waiting for the story to reach out and GRAB me. It never did. What it did have me doing is gritting my teeth in frustration each of the 3-4 times Kjeld explained or recalled what happened in the coliseum after, I—the reading audience—had already read about it in detail. Never happened. Just as repetitive were Kjeld’s thoughts of missing his friend and wondering about his family. More than half the story Kjeld spent worrying about this or that, and I felt like the coliseum fight and the very easily surmountable problems springing from it were dragged through the book to the very end as a page filler of sorts. I think that much of this time could have been used in developing a more concrete relationship between the adult Defried and Kjeld. I didn’t even think Defried reciprocated Kjeld’s feelings until nearly the last—and only—intimate scene between them. Where the banality of this comes in is with the tried and true concept of one friend realizing he loves another only after nursing him back from the brink of death/and or, being jealous of his courting of another person—both of which occurred here. Even the ending felt like a shot of whiskey. It went down abruptly and left a slow, unsatisfactory burn in its wake.