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kblincoln 's review for:
The Weaver and the Witch Queen
by Genevieve Gornichec
4.5 stars, actually.
I put this one on my TBR pile after enjoying Gornichec’s retelling of the Loki/Angrboda myth from Angrboda’s point of view in The Witch’s Heart. Some of the vague summarizing I didn’t like so much in Angrboda’s travels in that book isn’t as present in this one, thankfully. Gunnhild, Mother of Kings and Oddny Kettilsdotter’s story is much more compelling as a result.
We meet young Gunnhild before a feast with her Kettilsdotter sister friends. There is a seeress and while Gunnhild is afraid to have her fate told because of orders from her domineering mother, Oddy and Signy convince her to jump into their fate telling. Some bad omens happen. Gunnhild can no longer handle living with her mother and decides to throw her lot in with the seeress.
Years later there’s a raid on Kettil’s farm, Signy is kidnapped and sold as a slave, and Oddy and Gunnhild decide in their own separate ways to go after her.
There is shamanic magic, politics in the form of King Harald’s kinslayer son Eric who takes a liking to Gunnhild and her magic, a raider captured and sworn to repay Oddny silver to recompense for her sister, and at the heart of it, different takes on loyalty and vengeance in the historical context of the different tribes of vikings.
Very interesting. It isn’t happily ever after, and the questions about friendship vs romance are never really satisfactorily answered, but the ways in which women live out their power in this book in the context of viking society was pretty cool.
I put this one on my TBR pile after enjoying Gornichec’s retelling of the Loki/Angrboda myth from Angrboda’s point of view in The Witch’s Heart. Some of the vague summarizing I didn’t like so much in Angrboda’s travels in that book isn’t as present in this one, thankfully. Gunnhild, Mother of Kings and Oddny Kettilsdotter’s story is much more compelling as a result.
We meet young Gunnhild before a feast with her Kettilsdotter sister friends. There is a seeress and while Gunnhild is afraid to have her fate told because of orders from her domineering mother, Oddy and Signy convince her to jump into their fate telling. Some bad omens happen. Gunnhild can no longer handle living with her mother and decides to throw her lot in with the seeress.
Years later there’s a raid on Kettil’s farm, Signy is kidnapped and sold as a slave, and Oddy and Gunnhild decide in their own separate ways to go after her.
There is shamanic magic, politics in the form of King Harald’s kinslayer son Eric who takes a liking to Gunnhild and her magic, a raider captured and sworn to repay Oddny silver to recompense for her sister, and at the heart of it, different takes on loyalty and vengeance in the historical context of the different tribes of vikings.
Very interesting. It isn’t happily ever after, and the questions about friendship vs romance are never really satisfactorily answered, but the ways in which women live out their power in this book in the context of viking society was pretty cool.