Free Ebook Review: I Bring The Fire 1 Wolves by C. Gockel
(I'm trying to review all the free or cheap e-books I read all the way through. This is one. It's a $3 book on Amazon, but BookBub had for free one day.)
I wasn't expecting a lot out of I Bring The Fire: I (Wolves) by C. Gockel. The god Loki bouncing around in modern-day America could be done badly so easily.
But it's done well. This isn't exactly your standard mythological Loki. He's close enough to recognize, but, e.g., the Aesir here aren't quite gods, Bifrost isn't exactly a rainbow bridge, there's no Valhalla or Naglfar, etc. This is not due to ignorance on the author's part. The author knows his Norse mythology. Hoenir is an important characters in the novel, and I had to look up who he was. In fact, the characters know their Norse mythology: the Aesir know what's actually going on in the world of this story, and the humans know the standard mythology, which makes for a good moments here and there.
Loki is well-done, if you can consider turning a major villain into a hero to be doing it well. He is, by turns, a slick trickster, an arrogant god, and a sad man who has suffered a terrible loss. We learn a good deal about his past, in flashbacks, and it all makes sense. In any event, he's an engaging character and well worth reading about. He reminds me most of Corwin of Amber, not that Gockel is up to Zelazny.
Aside from Loki, plot and characters are entertaining but a bit flat. I rate this four displaced deities out of five: distinctly above average, and worth reading.