Snow-walker

Drawing inspiration from Norse mythology and Scandinavian sagas, Catherine Fisher weaves an enchanting web filled with interesting and intriguing story lines, likeable characters (with two very strong female characters: one clever and the other terrifying), all too believable dark spells and magic,

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and an atmosphere that conjures up the cold beauty of northern Scandinavia. Written for children as the target audience, the prose is beautiful but relatively simple, with just the odd unfamiliar word here and there, and plot lines that are easy to follow, but the real attractions of this book for me were the evocative descriptions of the landscape in all its diversity: bleak marshes and moorlands, dark and sinister forests, desolate plains of snow and ice, but also the brief beauty of a Scandinavian midsummer with its abundance of flora against a backdrop of fjords and mountains, not forgetting the warm comfort and safety of the Jarlshold with its large fireplaces. I wish she had paid equal attention to the plot, as the second book contains a hole large enough to drive a tractor through, the characterisations are fairly two-dimensional and, in the case of the villain in book 2, fairly transparent, with few real surprises, and big question marks are left hanging over certain aspects of the plot in books 1 and 3; that said, the stories are well written and tense, and the very different nature of the quests in each of the three books kept me engaged and eager to pick up the book again. The device of removing the witch Gudrun from the action worked rather well, as she was a far more terrifying influence from afar where she could work her magic mischief. I think that children from the age of 9 upwards, who are confident readers, and maybe even their parents, will thoroughly enjoy reading about the adventures of Jessa, Kari, Brochael, Wulfgar and the poet Skapti.

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