Tessa Gratton

These stories take place in a modern world, similar to ours with cars, mobile phones, and reality TV exist, and where Norse gods and their children are real and live among us. I love how the gods are so real and present in these books, how they manage to be both part of mythology and reality.

Glory's Teeth: This book! This book is dedicated "to all the hungry girls" and, oh, yes it is for them. For us. Glory is the Fenris Wolf trapped in human form so she won't eat Baldur and begin Ragnarok. show more But she's so hungry, and she was made to devour, and Baldur is so very tempting. Also tempting are berserker Soren Bearstar, devoted to Baldur, and Tyr the Just, the god who controls her. Glory is fascinating. She's wild and controlled and she wants so much to eat and eat and end everything, but she can't. It's hard for me to describe what I got out of this book, except to say that a lot of women I know are like Glory, wanting so much to be themselves and not being allowed. Loved it, loved it, loved it. show less

To be honest, in the beginning this story feels like an M. Night Shyamalan movie -- isolated, idyllic village, where they keep to the old ways and there's danger in the woods -- sound familiar? Anyway, that's where the similarities end, and I enjoyed the story and the contemplation of sacrifice and bargains. I also enjoyed the non-traditional love triangle very much, and the ways that questions about identity echo around each of the characters in different ways. I do think that the agonizing show more over what to do stretches out a little longer than it needs to, but on the whole, lots of delicious visuals (really, I kept wondering if Tessa Gratton is also a painter) and a well-paced story full of transformations.

Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss. show less

Signy Valborn has fire in her veins. Anger over a devastating childhood incident led her to climb the New World Tree where she met and was claimed by the Alfather, Odin, for his own.

But being a Valkyrie in training is not what she expected. The current Valkyries are tame compared to their history. They are the consultants to kings and presidents, and Signy longs for, burns for, the old ways.

The final insult comes when she wakes to find a riddle on the day she is supposed to become a fully show more realized Valkyrie. It's a question she must answer. One she cannot find a solution to. It keeps her from rising to the full position of Alfather's fierce servant, and it sets her on a dark, dark journey to find herself.

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Dark, dark, dark. If you have read THE LOST SUN you will likely not be prepared for THE STRANGE MAID. This is a story about fate and death and longing. Its a story that explores 'the glory' of revenge and unlike the previous book, there is more truth to the world-building here. These people seem closer to what I would expect from those descended from Vikings, from those who live and worship the old gods. There are fewer Christian sensibilities in this book. We get new insight into the Berserker battle lust, and we get animal sacrifices.

I love this book because it's more adult (and possibly not YA any longer), and because there's less dancing around the violence.

I love this book because there's poetry in the writing. The use of words isn't frothy and light, but dense and evocative. And Tessa Gratton is afraid to let her characters take sex casually or lose themselves to what we might consider madness.

--review copy show less

The romance really didn't work for me in this book, which is too bad because it's the only thing that's happening for a lot of the book. It wasn't so much the insta-love itself, but the way it flattened the relationship between the two leads, Talon and Darling. It's supposedly an enemies-to-lovers situation, but the transition was too fast and too complete to be interesting to me. There was little complexity to their feelings and relationship and the fact that they were former (and maybe show more even still) enemies didn't do much to inform them. Talon went from thinking about how he kind of wanted to kiss this girl who was trying to kill him to trusting her to protect his beloved brother in about 0.2 seconds flat. I didn't mind the first part, but the latter had me wondering how he survived this long as the War Prince doing things like this. I could see hints of how they might warm to each other and find some common ground, so it was especially disappointing how the story basically skipped over any development to their relationship.

In addition to Talon's and Darling's romance, the pacing felt off in other aspects of the story as well. The plot was plodding and only picked up in the last couple chapters. I was left surprised that the book was ending because it felt like the plot had barely started moving. At the same time, however, the visits our main characters make to the other Houses felt rushed. The world and magic of Chaos and Flame intrigued me and I was excited that the tour of Houses plot would provide a chance to show off different cultures and myths within it and see what interesting characters populate this world. If the plot had been slow, but an exploration of the world was interesting enough I would have been satisfied; too bad it also felt shallow.

The first chapter, showing Caspian's boon was great and there were aspects of the worldbuilding and the characters that were done well enough, but overall I wasn't very impressed or entertained by it. show less