Heroes of the Valley (2009)

Signed!

I'm always delighted with Jonathan Stroud's ability to immediately set a tone and basic assumptions of the book's world. Heroes of the Valley has some resonance with Stroud's other single-volume young adult novels, though it has more of an explicit fantasy-genre style (with an undertone of horror thrown in). This book raises questions of the nature of tales and their veracity. With strong male and female protagonists and moments of great humor, this should appeal to fans of Sage's Septimus Heap series, though perhaps not those of Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. ( )

Heroes of the Valley, by Jonathan Stroud, tells the story of Halli, the youngest son of the head of the House of Svein, one of 12 houses of ancient Heroes that populate the valley of the title. All his life, Halli has heard stories of the great heroes, and in particular Svein, the greatest hero, and how they fought off the dreadful Trows, terrible beasts that lived under the ground and only came up at night, to kill and eat humans. Svein and his heroic companions all died in the defense, but subsequently were buried in massive cairns that ringed the entire valley and protected the people from the Trows, who had been driven beyond the cairns. It was up to the people now, generations later, to stick to Svein's rules and never pass the cairns. The valley has lived peacefully since, with the male head of each House being the Arbiter and the female head becoming the Law-Giver; together, the Houses resolve disagreements and maintain order. Halli has always dreamed of being heroic, like Svein, but unlike the rest of his family, he's short and bandy-legged, and above all given to playing practical jokes on people, none of which endears him to his family or his House. When he plays a joke on the visiting son of the House of Hakon that results in the lad becoming ill for a time, actions are set into motion that lead to the murder of his uncle and Halli's determination to leave his House, travel to the House of Hakon and avenge his uncle's death there. But that is only the beginning of the troubles Halli has visited upon his House, and himself - and he must finally learn the truth of the stories of the ancient Heroes, and overcome them....While not as engaging as Stroud's demonic Bartimaeus Trilogy, Heroes of the Valley paints a vivid portrait of how an ancient Viking settlement might have lived. A nice touch was including a new part of Svein's heroic cycle at the beginning of each chapter; this enables us to watch Halli's parallel path to heroism and see how much the ancient and the modern have in common. I'm not sure that this would be for young children, as there's a great deal of violence, some quite graphic, but then again, it's a fun read for an adult. Recommended. ( )

Halli loves to listen to stories of the old days when adventure and heroism was the order of the day rather than farming. He's a younger son and short and he's searching for a purpose in life and not finding it easy. Along with Aud the two of them discover more about the valley and the legends than they thought was possible. Not my favourite read by this author.

I loved the Bartimaeus trilogy but this one didn't grasp me as well. It came across as being a bit bitty and I found it quite hard to keep reading. It wasn't a bad story but I didn't enjoy it as much as previous books. ( )

This young adult fantasy adventure explores the tyranny the past can exercise over the present through tradition and social convention. The story is set in a valley of villages, each led by a hereditary chief, and dominated by their shared Norse-ish culture. Between the cultivated regions of the valley and the surrounding mountain ridges, a line of burial mounds houses the corpses of past heroes whose vigilance keeps evil monsters at bay. The feel of the book is (intentionally) claustrophobic, which, since it's a coming of age story, may resonate for teens feeling out of step with family or school. Although told in the third person, the narration hews closely to the perspective of the main character, Halli -- so closely, in fact, that the rare shift to a truly third person omniscient view of Halli is jarring. Just as a matter of personal taste, I found Halli's relationship with kindred-spirit Aud annoying -- too much bickering, and not enough genuine affection.

The arc of the main character's growth has a distinctly Gen-X sensibility. Halli starts callow, having absorbed years of stories -- which sound like tall tales, except that everyone takes them as gospel truth -- about honor and manly violence. His experiences deepen and disillusion him, so that by the end of the book, Halli acts out of a combination of resignation and anger, and above all, renunciation. It's a different tone than the fantasy coming of age stories I recall reading as a kid, like Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, where the proof of maturation is the ability to give of oneself to support love and community. ( )