Ludo is a young Bavarian boy who, on a long winter night, pursues his beloved workhorse on the path of a shooting star. There are many similarities between these two books beyond the identically formatted titles, one of which being remarkably similar discussions about the quasi-mystical art of woodcarving (IIRC I didn’t re-read LatSH for this review), and the primary one being that the young male protagonist must leave home and travel into the realm of mythology. Mary Stewart - another British author with the gift of writing for multiple audiences - wrote three novels for kids, one of which is Ludo and the Star Horse (1974). Ultimately, OatFG almost feels like an origin story I wouldn’t be shocked to see Odd pop up as a fully-realized adult character in a future novel.īeyond the more obvious connections, I found a book from my childhood tugging at my memory as I read OatFG. Writing sparely, in the style of an old legend, Gaiman leaves us with a lot of room to speculate on Odd’s motivations and internal dialogue. The title character is especially interesting. An act of courage and compassion puts him in league with a trio of down-on-their-luck Norse gods (you’ll have to forgive me if they were voiced by Hemsworth, Hiddleston, and especially Hopkins in my imagination) and sets him on his way from Midgard to Asgard and back again.
Then winter refuses to pass into spring (“The cold never bothered me anyway!”) and Odd leaves home for his father’s abandoned work cottage.
His woodcutter father dies and his mother remarries, leaving Odd unsure about his place in his family or his village. Odd is a 12-year-old Viking boy with a crippled leg (played in my internal cinema by a more subdued Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon). There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about OatFG‘s plot in fact, one of the things I liked best about it was its fodder for studying schema and making text-to-text connections, which is probably proof right there that you can take the English teacher out of the classroom but you can’t make her stop being a nerd. Include in that category his lesser-known 2008 book Odd and the Frost Giants. He writes epic fantasy for adults, he writes lushly illustrated abecedarians - but his sweet spot, arguably, is spooky bildungsromans for the tween set (think Coraline and The Graveyard Book). Writing for children is harder than it looks, so I especially appreciate it when an adult fiction author can also write successfully for kids.
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