9 From the Nine Worlds

9 From the Nine Worlds by Rick Riordan is a set of nine short Norse adventures for 9 year olds, and the hero of the series doesn't narrate a single one of them.

What happens

That's the whole idea. Each story is told in the first person by somebody who is usually standing at the edge of the picture. The friend. The fiancé. The dwarf. The elf.

Odin opens the book from his magic throne, sounding exactly like a headteacher who has had enough. A Valkyrie food fight has broken out. Nobody will volunteer to be the new captain. And his son Thor has set off to run a lap of every world in leather shorts, trying to clock ten million steps on an ankle tracker so he can get himself on television.

The stories themselves are short, fast and very silly. Amir goes shopping for something to wear and meets a dwarf shop assistant who is not the usual one. Blitzen gets chased through a dwarf city by a rival on a rocket powered walking frame. Hearthstone, who has never heard a voice in his life, tells his story in his own words while his friends sign with him.

That last one is quietly the best thing in the book.

The jokes are modern and knowing. Gods have mobile phones. Heimdall, who is meant to be watching the rainbow bridge for the end of the world, is instead filming goats for his Snapchat story.

Now the two things to check before you hand it over.

One story has a genuinely horrible idea in it. Amir is tricked into putting on a pair of trousers that turn out to be nábrók, made from the skin of a dead man, and specifically from his own ancestor. He gags, he claws at them, he can't get them off. It is played as comic horror rather than gore, and it does not last long. But if your reader is the sort who lies awake thinking about that kind of thing, it will do it.

The other is simpler and matters more. This book assumes you already know Magnus Chase and his friends. Sam, Alex, Blitzen and Hearthstone arrive with no introduction and the jokes land properly only if you've met them. The Magnus Chase novels aren't currently in the library, so a reader coming to this cold will enjoy the daftness but miss half the point.

What to read next

For a reader who wants more of Riordan doing exactly this, The Demigod Diaries is here. Same trick of handing the microphone to the side characters, this time in the Greek and Roman world, with a runaway diary, a stolen staff and an interview with a pair of talking snakes.