My boyfriend gave me a copy of this book for my birthday last year, but my birthday’s in late April and this is definitely a wintry book, or maybe a winter-on-the-edge-of-spring book, so it took us a while to pick it up. We read this aloud to each other, alternating chapters, on the evening of a February day that felt like spring but was, according to the weather forecast, only a temporary reprieve from polar-vortex cold, and it was really satisfying. It’s a middle-reader chapter book, so it’s short and straightforward; it’s also well-written, with some beautiful descriptive passages and bits of humor.
The hero of the story is Odd, a twelve-year-old boy in Viking Norway who’s always smiling despite things not being so great for him: his father is dead, he injured his leg in an accident while chopping down a tree, and his stepdad has too many kids from his own first marriage to want to deal with a “crippled stepson.” Meanwhile, winter is seemingly endless, and tensions in Odd’s village are high. Odd decides to go off alone to his father’s old hut in the woods, and spends a night there, after which he’s woken up in the morning by a fox scratching at the door. The fox clearly seems to want Odd to follow him, so Odd does, and we get this great passage:
It was, Odd concluded, an animal with a plan. He had no plans, other than a general determination never to return to the village. And it was not every day that you got to follow a fox.
So he did. (14)
The fox leads him to a bear whose paw is stuck in a tree, and Odd frees the bear, hoping he won’t turn out to be the bear’s lunch; the bear, far from eating him, lets Odd ride on his back, and the bear, the fox, an eagle who’s been flying overhead, and Odd all make their way back to Odd’s cabin, where the animals seem to want to come inside. Odd figures he might as well let them in, and they spend the night: when he wakes to hear them talking, he’s certain they aren’t ordinary animals: this, too, is funny and great:
“Somebody was talking,” said Odd, “and it wasn’t me. There isn’t anyone else in here. That means it was you lot. And there’s no point in arguing.”
“We weren’t arguing,” said the bear. “Because we can’t talk.” Then it said, “Oops.” (28)
So: the bear and the eagle and the fox turn out to be Thor and Odin and Loki, turned into animals and cast out of Asgard by an invading Frost Giant, which is why it’s still winter: Frost Giants like the cold. Odd, of course, ends up helping the gods get back to their kingdom and to their proper forms, and bringing the spring thaw to Midgard in the process. I like that it’s Odd’s quiet persistence (along with some help from the gods) that lets him succeed on his quest: mostly he just does what he needs to do, even when no one else thinks it’ll work, and he turns out to be right.
Other highlights of the book for me included the moment when Odd and the gods cross back to Asgard via the rainbow bridge:
Scarlet fell softly about them and everything was outlined in greens and blues and the world was raspberry-colored and leaf-colored and golden-colored and fire-colored and blueberry-colored and wine-colored. (54-55)
I also love Odd’s description of how he won Asgard back:
“Magic,” said Odd, and he smiled, and thought, If magic means letting things do what they wanted to do, or be what they wanted to be… (97)
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