Published By: John Murray
Pages: 272
Released On: 06/11/2025
Before she was a hideous monster, the queen of the underworld was simply Hel. But cast as a girl out of lofty Asgard, realm of the gods, by Odin the Allfather, Hel’s fate as the terrible goddess of death is sealed. Half beauty, half crone, she has reigned for aeons in the starless darkness of Niflheim, grimly welcoming the most pitiful of death’s travellers to her ice-locked prison. Until one day a memory shifts, and she is forced to seek out the sun in Midgard, where humans have made their home.
Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Helen Firth makes the impulsive decision to return to Orkney after forty years to make peace with her past. Under the wintering solstice sun, she reconnects with the ungainly but affable Thorfinn Coffin, who helps her address the real reason she has returned to the islands to die.
As Helen draws closer to death and ever closer to Thorfinn, Hel in turn is intrigued by Helen. She, too, has a past to confront and a lesson to learn: that perhaps who she thinks she is isn’t who she is really meant to be.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and John Murray for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I never used to like mythological retellings when I was younger, but now I’ve become a bit obsessed with them and this was another that I was so keen to read, but sadly it didn’t do it for me.
It’s very heavy. There is a huge amount of history and context, world building, character creation, and at times it’s just too much. I wanted it to be stretched out a bit more, because a lot of the information-heavy bits were right at the start. If it had been stretched out, dipped in and out of, it might have felt more seamless to read.
I had an issue with the characters in that…well…how to explain? You know when you read a series, in the first boo you get to meet the characters, invest in them. And then in book two, you don’t need all of that because it’s all been developed in book one. This book felt like book two. Whether the characters were well-known Gods, lesser-known myths, or normal people, it felt like we should already know who they are, an so they felt flat and I didn’t have any emotional investment in any of them.
There’s a lot of narrative, a lot of emotion, a lot of what I call airy-fairy nothingness, with not enough focus on the storyline or the characters. It felt like it was trying too hard to be something it’s not, whereas I feel a story about Hel could be really interesting if she had focussed more on the bare bones of what makes a good story, and less about making it sound deep and clever.
It flits between scenes – normal scenes, for want of a better word, scenes in present time on Earth, and scenes that are based in Asgard and the like, all gods and Frost Giants and whatnot. I usually love all that but not with this, there was an imbalance. I found the more ‘normal’ scenes much more interesting and would have preferred to read that story on its own, as I’m not sure all the Norse legends and myths really added anything other than confusion.
I made myself finish it because it’s not a long book but I am disappointed with it.
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