This is retelling of some of the Nordic myths and what they meant to the author as a little girl reading them with WWII as a backdrop. It causes you to reflect on myth, what they are and how they can be important. A.S. Byatt is a fantastic writer so the word choice and sentence construction is well done which keeps things from getting dry. Over all I enjoyed it, but not as much as her book, Possessions. I've long been interested in Norse mythology so I was excited to read this book. It was not great, but if you can persist through the other stuff, there is a nicely retold bit about the end of the Norse Gods. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of the Gods, is the myth in which the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats her own tail and crushes the world and the seas boil with poison.There were some nicely worded passages: "... and [they] made bonfires to greet the turn of the year. But the year did not exactly turn. The sky became a paler grey, that was all, and the earth and air and water stayed icy.""She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark."
Do You like book Ragnarök: The End Of The Gods (2011)?
Fine world building done with lots description, listing.
—aditi33
