Joanne Harris “Runemarks”
“Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, 500 years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.”
Amazon review:
Maddy Smith is a girl who has got it bad. Born with the runemark of the title on her hand, she is an oddball in her village, befriended only by a mysterious old man called One-Eye, who teaches her all she knows of magic. Unlike ordinary humans, Maddy can see goblins, and knows that where her friend’s glam (magic) is weak, hers is strong, though quite how strong she only discovers when she goes underground and meets a young man who calls himself Lucky. Before long Maddy is coping with the reawakened Sleepers, formerly Norse gods. Together with a pleasingly cynical oracular head called The Whisperer, who has plans of his own, she has to prevent the Nine Worlds from descending into Chaos.
This is Joanne Harris’ first children’s book. At least, it’s billed as one. I don’t know much about children’s books, but I know I enjoyed the story a lot when I read it recently.
Starting off with a brilliant first sentence it only got better along the way. Joanne Harris brings her usual descriptive and gripping writing style to this story and develops interesting and relatable characters, many of them taken from Norse mythology. Nevertheless I only read one or two chapters at a time – but not because I didn’t like it. On the contrary, I loved especially the old stories of the nordic gods that were mentioned in the context of this one and I wanted to savour this book slowly. But towards the end I just couldn’t put it down anymore.
I loved the ending, but I seriously doubt that the book is suited to young children. Seems a bit dark to me, but then again, so are most fairlytales, so what do I know? I’d rather give it to older children (teenagers) anyway.
On amazon the story was compared to Terry Pratchett’s – often unfavorably. Apart from the general genre (fantasy) I really can’t see all that many similarities to Pratchett. It did remind me quite a bit of Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” (which I also loved very much, even considering the fact that half the time I had no clue what he was talking about), only that here we have gods I have actually heard of before: Odin, Thor, Loki and lots of others. Loki especially has always been my favorite, and he was again in this story. It certainly helps if you know your way around the old myths a bit (but I can’t say of myself to be an expert in that field either), but I wouldn’t say it’s a prerequisite.
Since I read this book through a bookring on Bookcrossing (for which I am very grateful, because otherwise I wouldn’t even have known Ms. Harris had writen a new one), I had to send the copy on to the next reader. But this is definitely a book I’d like to re-read at some point.
After going through the review, I really want to read Runemarks and have some fun.
Sounds good – Have you read Gaiman’s wonderful graphic novels series “The Sandman”? – There’s a lot of references to mystery, myths and ancient gods in those – wonderful to read and the art work is stunning.
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