Odd, the Frost Giant, and Ash
Oct. 21st, 2009 13:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyGaiman, Neil. Odd and the Frost Giants. New York: Harper, 2009.
The back cover bills this little volume as "short but perfectly formed," which is true as far as it goes: it's the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, and misunderstood stepson Odd, whose father died in a Viking raid and whose leg was smashed shortly after, falls in with a bear, an eagle and a fox in an effort to save Midgard by finding a rainbow bridge to Asgard so that the Æsir can be restored to power. This is another book that I'd be miffed to have paid full price for, but like most of Gaiman's books for younger readers it is charming and worth the time investment. Best line: "'We don't talk about that,' said the fox."
Lo, Malinda. Ash. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
For someone who doesn't care for fairy stories, I've certainly been reading a lot of them lately. This book, a debut novel, takes the familiar story of Cinderella and inverts it in a number of key ways: Ash has a fairy godfather (or maybe it's better to say, a fairy sugar daddy?) by way of her late mother, and doesn't care a fig for the prince. Instead, she falls in love with an intriguing, liminal figure: Kaisa, the King's Huntress.
I read this book in a night--the language is beautiful, and the story is very skillfully told. As much as I loved Ash and rooted for her to escape her evil stepmother and stepsisters (though Lo follows more recent Cinderella stories, or at least the movie Ever After, in making the younger stepsister sympathetic), the backstory in the novel is just as interesting as the foregrounded tale: of Fairy and human realms that abutted each other, with the King's Huntress acting as a go-between, until the realms fell apart and fairy stories dwindled into superstition and unthinking tradition. The solution to Ash's dilemma was also beautifully worked out.
The back cover bills this little volume as "short but perfectly formed," which is true as far as it goes: it's the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, and misunderstood stepson Odd, whose father died in a Viking raid and whose leg was smashed shortly after, falls in with a bear, an eagle and a fox in an effort to save Midgard by finding a rainbow bridge to Asgard so that the Æsir can be restored to power. This is another book that I'd be miffed to have paid full price for, but like most of Gaiman's books for younger readers it is charming and worth the time investment. Best line: "'We don't talk about that,' said the fox."
Lo, Malinda. Ash. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
For someone who doesn't care for fairy stories, I've certainly been reading a lot of them lately. This book, a debut novel, takes the familiar story of Cinderella and inverts it in a number of key ways: Ash has a fairy godfather (or maybe it's better to say, a fairy sugar daddy?) by way of her late mother, and doesn't care a fig for the prince. Instead, she falls in love with an intriguing, liminal figure: Kaisa, the King's Huntress.
I read this book in a night--the language is beautiful, and the story is very skillfully told. As much as I loved Ash and rooted for her to escape her evil stepmother and stepsisters (though Lo follows more recent Cinderella stories, or at least the movie Ever After, in making the younger stepsister sympathetic), the backstory in the novel is just as interesting as the foregrounded tale: of Fairy and human realms that abutted each other, with the King's Huntress acting as a go-between, until the realms fell apart and fairy stories dwindled into superstition and unthinking tradition. The solution to Ash's dilemma was also beautifully worked out.