Odd sighed. “Which one of you wants to explain what’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing’s going on,” said the fox brightly. “Just a few talking animals. Nothing to worry about. Happens every day. We’ll be out of your hair first thing in the morning.”
Technically a reread (first read in 2009: review here): I had a free trial of Audible with my new Kindle and wanted to try out an audiobook, and one of the '52 book club' prompts was 'audiobook read by author'... Odd and the Frost Giants is the story of Odd, a crippled half-Scots, half-Viking boy who runs away from home. It's not quite like the ballads his mother sings to him. Instead of a horse, a hound and a hawk, he finds himself in the company of a bear, a fox and an eagle, who are not what they seem.
I find that I have a very different experience of a book when listening. My concentration drifts; I tend to fall asleep if it's after about 6pm; I can't annotate or highlight or save choice quotations. I also found, listening to this story with which I was already familiar, that different aspects snagged in my mind. When I first read it in book form, I was focussed on Loki (this was before I had encountered his MCU incarnation) and the plight of the gods, while this time it was Odd -- with his cheerful stoicism, his disability, and his irritating smile -- who caught my attention. He is, after all, the protagonist: and Gaiman (whose narration is warm, pleasant and animated) is telling Odd's story, not the story of three talking animals and a winter that won't quit.
Fulfils the ‘Audiobook is narrated by the author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.
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