Odd and the Frost Giants

Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants is a Norse adventure for 9 year olds in which a fox leads a Viking boy on a crutch deep into a winter that will not end.

What happens

Odd is twelve and lives on a fjord in Norway. His name means the tip of a blade and it's meant to be lucky, which it hasn't been.

His father died two years ago on a raid, and not gloriously. He jumped into a grey sea to rescue one of the ponies, hauled it back aboard, and died before morning of the cold and the water in his lungs. Odd didn't cry. He didn't say anything at all. In a village where everyone knows everyone's business, that drove people mad.

Three weeks later he took his father's tree-cutting axe out to practise on a tree far too big for him. It came down on his leg. He dug himself out with the axe, cut a branch for a crutch, and walked home dragging the axe with him, because metal was precious and he wasn't going to leave it.

He still smiles, which annoys the village even more.

That winter refuses to end. March comes and the ice stays hard. Everyone is stuck in the great hall together getting on each other's nerves, and the jokes turn mean. So Odd steals a side of smoked salmon and a pot of embers, and limps off to his dead father's hut in the woods to be left alone.

In the morning there's a fox outside, and it clearly wants him to follow it.

What that fox leads him to is a bear with its paw wedged in a hollow tree, and an eagle circling above with nothing but darkness where one eye should be. Your reader will probably work out who these three are a good while before Odd does, which is part of the fun.

It's quiet, dry and matter of fact. Odd talks to the bear like he talks to everyone, which is honestly and without much hope, and it's very funny in places.

A couple of things to know. The father's death is described plainly, and so is the leg, which stays crushed. Villagers call Odd a cripple and an idiot to his face. There's also one flat line about how his mother came to be there, carried onto a longship out of Scotland after his father took her knife away, and the book doesn't stop to comment on it. If your child asks about that, and they might, it's worth having an answer ready.

What to read next

For more of the same gods in a much louder mood, 9 From the Nine Worlds has Odin, Thor and a hotel full of Valkyries, played entirely for jokes.