Though written for a younger audience, Odd and the Frost Giants is an entertaining read for adults as well, as it’s intelligent and clever.Īs the title suggests, Gaiman mines Norse mythology for his tale of a runaway Norwegian boy who saves his land from a perpetual winter brought about by a careless god. This post is part of the Thursday Quotables meme.This slim, whimsical YA novel is Neil Gaiman’s contribution to World Book Day 2008, one of nine £1.00 children’s books made available for this event. I think this openness is what gives that peculiar sense of wonder to his stories: his characters know anything can happen, and they accept it when it happens. I truly love that sense of naivety many of Gaiman’s characters have. This is the retelling, somehow updated, of a Norse myth, and it’s full of wonder, of mystery, of magic and of ingenuity. It was written years ago for the International Reading Day, but it sure resembles what Gaiman has written many years later and is out this year: the Norse Mythology. As if reality and magic were meant to exist together. There’s a strange quality to Neil Gaiman’s writing, a sense that everything is perfectly plausible mixed with a strong sense of the wondrous. There was a school of thought that maintained that what Odd had presented the Giant with was a realistic carving of Thor’s hammer, and that the Giant had been unable to tell the real from the false, and had fled, in terror. Some of the Gods claimed that it was a wooden key, and some said it was a wooden heart. When, in the years that followed, the Gods told this tale, late at night, in the great hall, the always hesitated at this point, because in a moment Odd will reach into his jerkin, and pull out something carved of wood, and none of them was certain what it was. And if I take Thor’s hammer he’ll just come after it, and one day he’ll get it, and then he’ll kill me.’ ‘But if I take Freya back to Jotunheim, she’ll just shout at me and make everything worse. ‘I turned it into this boulder I sit on.’ It’s only a matter of time until he gets here.’ ‘You banished Thor to Midgard,’ said Odd, ‘yet he’s back now. ‘I am trying,’ said Odd, ‘to allow you to go home with your honour intact and a whole skin. ‘Anyway, birds, they just head for the nearest tree.’ ‘I’d never fall for that one’, said the Giant.

In one of them, they had a stone-throwing contest, but the boy had a bird, not a stone, and it went up into the air and it just kept going.’ ‘My mother used to tell me stories about boys who tricked Giants. 24th August 2017 jazzfeathers fantasy, folktales, Thursday Quotables 6 Comments

Odd and the frost giants review