Helpful Score: 3
My timing on reading this book turned out to be nearly perfect. I'd just finished a great deal of research on Norse mythology for a project that I was commissioned to write, and I was heading out for a week of vacation on the beach and grabbed this book as something small and 'light' for beach reading.
Having so many of the Norse gods and their relationships and places still in my head, this book struck me as extremely well researched and a fun take on the personalities. I knew immediately who each character was and of course I knew their relationship with the other characters. I did wonder, though, if I hadn't been as fmailiar with them before reading this, would I have enjoyed this book nearly as much? Probably not.
Although I gave this book four stars, based on my own enjoyment of reading it, I did have a few problems with the story.
First, while I really liked the idea of "Norse Code" -- a technologically modern center for finding appropriate people to bring to Valhalla to fight for Odin at the final battle, I felt that this gimmick was ill-used. Certainly not worthy of the title of the book. It came into play in the first couple of chapters and then was really nothing at all important to the story.
Second, we as readers had to take some giant leaps (pun intended) of literary faith to accept that everything that happens in the story is simply because one woman, a mortal who became a Valkyrie, wants to rescue her sister and a man she doesn't know (but whom she killed) from Hel. I don't think that the relationship with the sister was ever really established enough, and the guilt over killing the man was definitely not believable. Perhaps that's why both ... neither was strong enough motivation? Even so...for all that these people faced, marching into Hel, attempting to stop Ragnarok (the final battle), facing undefeatable foes, all to rescue two people... well, it just seemed a bit lame, quite frankly.
If I could have given this three and a half stars, I would have, but I stand by the four stars because ... well, I enjoyed it.
Having so many of the Norse gods and their relationships and places still in my head, this book struck me as extremely well researched and a fun take on the personalities. I knew immediately who each character was and of course I knew their relationship with the other characters. I did wonder, though, if I hadn't been as fmailiar with them before reading this, would I have enjoyed this book nearly as much? Probably not.
Although I gave this book four stars, based on my own enjoyment of reading it, I did have a few problems with the story.
First, while I really liked the idea of "Norse Code" -- a technologically modern center for finding appropriate people to bring to Valhalla to fight for Odin at the final battle, I felt that this gimmick was ill-used. Certainly not worthy of the title of the book. It came into play in the first couple of chapters and then was really nothing at all important to the story.
Second, we as readers had to take some giant leaps (pun intended) of literary faith to accept that everything that happens in the story is simply because one woman, a mortal who became a Valkyrie, wants to rescue her sister and a man she doesn't know (but whom she killed) from Hel. I don't think that the relationship with the sister was ever really established enough, and the guilt over killing the man was definitely not believable. Perhaps that's why both ... neither was strong enough motivation? Even so...for all that these people faced, marching into Hel, attempting to stop Ragnarok (the final battle), facing undefeatable foes, all to rescue two people... well, it just seemed a bit lame, quite frankly.
If I could have given this three and a half stars, I would have, but I stand by the four stars because ... well, I enjoyed it.
Helpful Score: 2
It takes a little getting into, and it helps to have read some of Norse mythology. You have to appreciate that the humor is quite dark. Norse mythology by structure is fatalistic. Ragnarok, after all. But once you accept it, it's really quite funny and clever.
Helpful Score: 1
This was a difficult book for me to understand, let alone get into. The premise sounded good but I just didn't like it.
This is one of those books you both love and hate. It did some things really really well and some things really really badly.
First the bad. I agree with previous reviewers. The title is misleading. The whole Norse code premise didn't really make sense and either needed to be fleshed out more or nixed completely as it ended up having very little to do with the pertinent plot points. Mist's sudden need to visit Helheim to save a mortal she barely knew when she's managed to restrain herself from saving her sister for several months, is not explained very well. It is weak and perhaps the book would have been better if Mist had just decided it was time to save her sister after completing Valkyrie training. Also, several of the Norse gods act very little like you'd expect. This isn't necessarily bad, but it needed better explanation. If you are going to turn the nicest gods into baddies then you need to give the reader a sense of why or how this happened. The bad guys were obvious from the very beginning leaving us with little surprises but big questions regarding motives that are never really addressed but in the shallowest of terms. With the exception of Hermod, all the characters are shallowly written and the reader has little invested in what happens to them. This also causes the budding romances to seem awkward and, well, not romantic. But the biggest problem with this book is that it begins abruptly and ends abruptly making you feel as if you missed something vital. I hate to say it, but this is a book that would have benefitted from being longer and/or all the people associated with the Norse Code project edited out. It needed a better foundation upon which to build.
The good. The sense of scale and power of the world ending was truly poetic. In fact, as I was reading this novel I was time and time again reminded of the epic quality of the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It was the curious mix of absurdity, scale, myth, and horror that made me keep reading despite myself. When Hermod faces against wolf pups who can suck him into a vacuum of nonexistence, dwarven swords made of out seven kinds of nothing, or the nine realms of Yggdrasil spilling and bleeding out into each other as Ragnorak draws closer, it was then that I was fascinated by this novel and its imagery. Despite these not being the Norse gods I recognize from mythology, I kind of like that von Eekhout made heroes and villains out of the lesser known Norse gods and that he subverted the idea of who starts Ragnorak and for what purposes. There were several silly villains but the most charismatic was the blink-and-you-miss-him-in-mythology Vidar. Hod, another god with very little to do in mythology but accidentally kill his brother was another interesting side character who I think should have been utilized more. The humor was also pretty dark and almost Joss Wedon-esque. It saved some rather stupid scenes in my humble opinion.
Overall an interesting tale to read *if* you already love Norse mythology and can overlook a few aggravating problems with the plot.
First the bad. I agree with previous reviewers. The title is misleading. The whole Norse code premise didn't really make sense and either needed to be fleshed out more or nixed completely as it ended up having very little to do with the pertinent plot points. Mist's sudden need to visit Helheim to save a mortal she barely knew when she's managed to restrain herself from saving her sister for several months, is not explained very well. It is weak and perhaps the book would have been better if Mist had just decided it was time to save her sister after completing Valkyrie training. Also, several of the Norse gods act very little like you'd expect. This isn't necessarily bad, but it needed better explanation. If you are going to turn the nicest gods into baddies then you need to give the reader a sense of why or how this happened. The bad guys were obvious from the very beginning leaving us with little surprises but big questions regarding motives that are never really addressed but in the shallowest of terms. With the exception of Hermod, all the characters are shallowly written and the reader has little invested in what happens to them. This also causes the budding romances to seem awkward and, well, not romantic. But the biggest problem with this book is that it begins abruptly and ends abruptly making you feel as if you missed something vital. I hate to say it, but this is a book that would have benefitted from being longer and/or all the people associated with the Norse Code project edited out. It needed a better foundation upon which to build.
The good. The sense of scale and power of the world ending was truly poetic. In fact, as I was reading this novel I was time and time again reminded of the epic quality of the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It was the curious mix of absurdity, scale, myth, and horror that made me keep reading despite myself. When Hermod faces against wolf pups who can suck him into a vacuum of nonexistence, dwarven swords made of out seven kinds of nothing, or the nine realms of Yggdrasil spilling and bleeding out into each other as Ragnorak draws closer, it was then that I was fascinated by this novel and its imagery. Despite these not being the Norse gods I recognize from mythology, I kind of like that von Eekhout made heroes and villains out of the lesser known Norse gods and that he subverted the idea of who starts Ragnorak and for what purposes. There were several silly villains but the most charismatic was the blink-and-you-miss-him-in-mythology Vidar. Hod, another god with very little to do in mythology but accidentally kill his brother was another interesting side character who I think should have been utilized more. The humor was also pretty dark and almost Joss Wedon-esque. It saved some rather stupid scenes in my humble opinion.
Overall an interesting tale to read *if* you already love Norse mythology and can overlook a few aggravating problems with the plot.
