Showing no inclination to pick up the opener’s plodding pace, Riley marches his preteen spellcaster through wordy reveries and exposition, conveniently overheard conversations, and recurrent dream encounters with a foe given to ALL-CAPS bombast as one ill-starred rescue scheme gives way on the fly to others. Nightmarish visions prompt desperate gambles for young magic-wielder Fort as he continues his efforts to rescue his father from the mysterious Old Ones. Silhouette spots are interspersed with dramatic, limited-color double-page spreads that show off and deepen the narrative, sometimes portraying harsh, raw, and even frightening scenes, sometimes gentle and illuminating ones each is a tour de force of design and execution. Equally spare and forceful are the masterful illustrations. With each story, readers will realize both the close connection the people felt with the natural world and how deeply they lived their spare and forceful existence. While the archaic details may be unfamiliar, the basic essence of the human condition comes through loud and clear-and comfortingly. A human girl is given the gift of flax by the goddess Frigg, wife of Odin, the Allfather. A mother and father implore the gods for help to save their daughter from a troll. The five tales gathered here, mostly from Iceland, have a powerful, unadorned way of going, reflecting the subsistence lives of the people who created them as a way to make sense of their often capricious existence. The gods lived in Asgard, above Midgard, and occasionally came to visit Midgard by way of a three-strand rainbow bridge. Midgard (“Middle Earth”), where humans lived, was also home to giants and dwarves and a place where spirits of the uneasy dead walked. In ninth-to-11th-century Scandinavia, the world was, to the humans who inhabited it, a place full of spirits, gods, trolls, giants, and dwarves.
A compendium of Norse tales from the age of the Vikings.
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