Books: Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer By Rick Riordan (2015)

“On his 16th birthday, homeless Boston orphan Magnus Chase (daughter-of-Athena Annabeth’s cousin) magically summon an ancient Norse sword, uses it against a fireball-throwing monster, drops the sword, and dies—but a girl in hijab on a flying horse grabs him and deposits him at the Hotel Valhalla for a new afterlife of perpetual preparation for Ragnarok. Turns out Ragnarok will come pretty soon unless he can retrieve the sword and somehow use it to rebind Fenris Wolf, who is about to slip the magical rope that’s kept him bound for millennia. This will take some doing.”

After the huge success of his Percy Jackson & The Olympians and its sequel series Heroes of Olympus (which I did not bother to read) Rick Riordan released the trilogy called the Kane Chronicles, which tackled Egyptian Mythology. I only read the first book in that series, The Red Pyramid and for one reason or another, never went on to read the others. Pyramid was not bad, but I saw Riordan sort of just doing a variation on a theme here. Plus, he still had difficulty creating three dimensional women characters that did not sound like guys.

But for reasons I can’t explain, I picked up his Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, which takes on Norse Mythology. Riordan does not stray too far from what’s come before, although this first book, The Sword of Summer, plays out more like an absurdist comedy than the mostly serious Percy Jackson books were.  And Magnus is a fairly likable character, smart and solves his problems rather cleverly. To balance out the blond, blue-eyed, skinny twink that is Chase, Riordan gives us a diverse supporting cast that includes a Muslim girl (who does not appear devote here, but seems happy with her future arranged marriage, which also means she and Magnus can be friends, which helps narrative because we don’t have any romantic tension between them) and a deaf elf and dark skinned dwarf.

The book is overlong by about 50 or 60 pages and that’s too bad. By the last 150 or so of this nearly 500 page book, I was ready for the story to end. And while Riordan clearly knows his mythology and expertly crafts them into his narrative, he also needs to know when to stop, because I actually felt the last third of the book was boring (if only because you already knew the ending). Much like the Kane Chronicles, I’m unsure if I want to continue onto books two and three. Maybe if I come across them in a used bookstore, I’ll grab them. But for now, I must move on.