The Sword of Summer

Rick Riordan's The Sword of Summer is a Norse myth adventure for 10 year olds that opens with its narrator promising you he's going to die.

What happens

He means it, too. Magnus Chase tells you on the very first page that this is the story of how he got himself killed. (Don't go trying it yourself, he says. It doesn't work that way.)

Magnus has been living rough in Boston for two years, ever since the night his mum told him to run. On the morning he turns sixteen, his friend Blitz shakes him awake under a bridge. Somebody is handing out flyers with his face on them.

That same morning he's broken into his creepy uncle Randolph's house and been told his father is a Norse god. Then he pulls something out of the Charles River without touching the water. It's meant to be a sword. It looks more like a rusty pipe covered in barnacles.

Next, a man in a very sharp black suit walks straight through a parked car, melting it in half. He'll spare Magnus's life in exchange for the sword.

Reading it is like listening to the funniest kid in the room tell a story he can barely believe himself. Magnus is sarcastic about EVERYTHING. His uncle becomes Uncle Freaky. The fire giant is Satan's fashion consultant. Who else would describe a fire giant like that?

His two best friends are lovely, too. They charge into battle with a pink Cupid's bow and a MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS sign from a toy shop. Hearth is deaf and talks to Magnus in sign language, and the pair of them have been quietly looking out for him all this time.

It's worth knowing what Magnus carries into the story. His mum was killed two years before it starts, the night two wolves with glowing blue eyes burst into their flat (that's backstory, not a twist). He steals from people he decides deserve it and isn't sorry. There's some mild swearing, and a lot of fire and fighting on a crowded bridge.

So it suits a reader who's happy with a narrator a good deal older than them and a few darker corners. If they love a joke in the middle of real danger, it's very much their kind of book.

What to read next

If they fall for the way Magnus talks, try The Lightning Thief next. It's Rick Riordan again, and Percy Jackson starts his story by warning you to close the book while you still can, then takes his class on a museum trip where one of the teachers may not be human.