Odd and the Frost Giants
2001
- fiction
- giants
- norse mythology
- odin (norse deity)
- thor (norse deity)
- heroes
- loki (norse deity)
- juvenile fiction
- science fiction
- the gates of asgard
The story
In this inventive, short, yet perfectly formed novel inspired by traditional Norse mythology, Neil Gaiman takes readers on a wild and magical trip to the land of giants and gods and back.In a village in ancient Norway lives a boy named Odd, and he's had some very bad luck: His father perished in a Viking expedition; a tree fell on and shattered his leg; the endless freezing winter is making villagers dangerously grumpy.Out in the forest Odd encounters a bear, a fox, and an eagle-three creatures with a strange story to tell.Now Odd is forced on a stranger journey than he had imagined-a journey to save Asgard, city of the gods, from the Frost Giants who have invaded it.It's going to take a very special kind of twelve-year-old boy to outwit the Frost Giants, restore peace to the city of gods, and end the long winter.Someone cheerful and infuriating and clever . . .Someone just like Odd.
What it’s like
Warm, wry and brisk, with the bright cold of a Norwegian winter on every page: snow-muffled villages, frost-glittering forests, the crackle of a hearth against the dark, all rendered in Gaiman's conversational, deadpan prose that slides easily between a boy's grumbling asides and the grand, half-comic weirdness of Asgard. The voice is intimate and unhurried, and the scenes move quickly, so it reads in an evening. The emotional register is cheerful and lightly melancholic, with a plucky, stubborn young hero who is more hopeful than heroic and a found-family warmth as an unlikely cast of animals and gods shuffles into his orbit. Violence is present but mild and mostly off-page, with fights kept brisk and cartoonish rather than gory, and no sexual content; fear is gentle and quickly eased. It suits a snowy weekend, a comfort reread, or reading aloud to a child, and is especially good for readers who want clever, funny myth retellings without bloodshed or dread.
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