The Witch's Heart

The Witch's Heart

By Genevieve Gornichec

Angrboda’s story begins where most witches' tales end: with a burning. A punishment from Odin for refusing to provide him with knowledge of the future, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the farthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be Loki, and her initial distrust of him transforms into a deep and abiding love.
 
Their union produces three unusual children, each with a secret destiny, who Angrboda is keen to raise at the edge of the world, safely hidden from Odin’s all-seeing eye. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life—and possibly all of existence—is in danger.
 
With help from the fierce huntress Skadi, with whom she shares a growing bond, Angrboda must choose whether she’ll accept the fate that she’s foreseen for her beloved family...or rise to remake their future. From the most ancient of tales this novel forges a story of love, loss, and hope for the modern age.

I just finished this one (like an hour ago), after reading it all through on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.  It's mostly sort of a character study, I suppose, although the incipient Ragnarok kicks the action up in the second part of the book.  

I had some loose knowledge of the Norse mythology, thanks to Horrible History and various collections of myths and legends, but all of Angrboda's story was unfamiliar to me.  From the bare minimum of research I did in the last five minutes, it looks like Gornichec fleshed out a fairly minor character and gave her an entire, cogent storyline of her own.  I have to say I would never have known it was all pieced together from very little source material.  She did a great job of making a solid, cohesive, and poignant narrative.  Although basically all of it is sad, the book itself wasn't sad - Angrboda's fairly angry and upset at parts, but avoids a lot of moping and it ultimately ends on a  hopeful note - Angrboda's primary goal of saving her daughter being successful in the end. 

Gornichec does a good job of introducing the various characters and defining the various factions, although some of the initial bad feeling between the Aesir and the giants (or why it's taken so long to start the end of the world, if it can be caused by a single fire giant) is glossed over. 

It's also interesting to me - and I don't know if this is more due to the source material or the sex of the author - that of all the violence that is done to Angrboda (and there is a lot), none of it is sexual violence.  I was talking with my mother the other day about a tv show and she was complaining that although it never went as far as sexual violence, it heavily implied the threat, which ruined her experience.  It does seem to me like it's become an easy (read: lazy) shorthand for artists to use when women are in danger.  It's so commonplace now that I almost assume that if a women is threatened, sexual violence is part of the threat.  And that sucks.  So while it seems weird to say about someone who is burned three times and had her heart cut out (and that's just in the first two pages), I appreciate that rape never comes into her storyline.  Not that it's entirely without weird sex stuff.  I mean, she hooks up with Loki, who is at one point a pregnant horse, and has three children, two of whom are a wolf and a snake, respectively. 

Overall, this was well written and engaging, a little bit slow and bittersweet.  It does feel a little fish-lens focused, in the sense that Angrboda is (naturally) the primary character, but everyone around her is a little fuzzy and out of focus, especially the further away they get.  Even Loki, who has maybe the second biggest role in this, suffers a little bit in that we never really do get into why he's so incapable of not getting into trouble. Gornichec is maybe unfairly constrained here because she doesn't have much flexibility over his actions from the original myths, and myths are more about the archetypes than nuance, but it is something to keep in mind - we're not here for Loki, or Skadi or Odin or Ragnarok.  We're here for Angrboda. 

Did I like it? Yes.  Am I passionate about it? Well, not really, and I feel a little guilty about it (can you tell), because it definitely deserves to find some passionate readers, but I did enjoy it and sometimes that's all we need.