Children (The Ten Worlds #1) by Bjørn Larssen

I'm one of those readers who, the moment a book's cover catches her eye, and the content is vaguely aligned with her interests, she'll snap the book up. And I really, really wanted to like Children by Bjørn Larssen. His writing style is strong and unrestrained, and perhaps it's the latter part of this description where things fell a little flat for me. I can liken this novel best to a vine that's been allowed to grow beyond the trellis, so that the structure of the book felt somewhat all over the place.

The story is told from the alternating points of view of the human magic-wielder Maya, exiled from the home of her foster-mother Freya (yes, THE Freya), she's left serving a king whom she doesn't like one bit. For Reasons that are many and varied. Enter Magni, the natural son of the god Thor, who has, ahem, an axe to grind with his father. Because, Reasons. I'm not going to go into the depth and breadth of this sprawling story, but as the Norns will have it, the tricksy, shapeshifting Maya's and soft-hearted Magni's paths do cross, and their individual tales weave fluidly with a retelling of some of the classic Norse myths.

Children is an ambitious read, and for the most Larrsen executes things well. Maya is desperate for freedom, but her desire for this comes at a great cost – one that she's perhaps not quite prepared to pay. Magni's life is anything but easy, and in his naïveté, he jumps from one cringe-worthy situation to another. And perhaps that was one of my main reasons why I wasn't as enamoured with this story as many other readers were – I felt that at times Magni's lack of guile made him fall almost squarely into the TSTL* category. Neither character, in my not-so-humble opinion, did much growing so much suffering one terrible denouement after the other.

The pacing for the novel also felt uneven, to me, at least, and at times confusing. There were moments when the writing became too fast, too unstructured, but then again, YMMV – this is most certainly an ambitious telling, but I'm pretty certain it's also not going to be everyone's cup of tea, as there are scenes of emotional, physical, and substance abuse, in addition to manipulation and oodles of violence. Then again, I wouldn't expect anything less from the Norse pantheon. They can be a tricksy lot who don't particularly care for those they see as being less than them. My thoughts are that this novel could have used a more rigorous structural edit right at the get-go, but on the whole this is still a worthy read. If you're looking for a 'lower-deck' type story featuring minor personages from the old sagas, then this might well be right for you. In this case, I suspect, that the fault for not liking this book as much as others did falls squarely with the reader.

* Too Stupid To Live