Book #14: Loki's Wolves
Loki's Wolves by K. L. Armstrong
(Book received free for review from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.)
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
There are young adult books that are good for both adult readers and for kids.
There are young adult books that are only good for young readers.
I can't give a book a bad rating because it falls into the latter category. I suspect young kids would enjoy this book series, though it didn't work for me (I gave up at the halfway point).
Loki's Wolves is set in the modern world, but in it Norse myths are real. The gods have died, but their children live on. Ragnarok (the final battle between Midgar the world-eating snake and the heroes) is on the horizon and one of each of the gods' children must team up to stop it.
The main characters in this first book are Thor's kid, Loki's kid, and a girl who as of the halfway point we hadn't found out who she was a child of (if any god, but she turned into a fish at one point, so it's quite likely that she's the great great great grandchild of one of the gods or of a trout).
The kids' first task was to find the rest of the children of the gods. Oh, and the adults are secretly against them because we think the end of the world would be a good thing -- since governments are corrupt, we want all life on earth to be destroyed so things can start over. I missed that memo.
My problem with the story (and why it might be good for young kids) is that there were no real (bad) consequences for their actions. In the last scene I read, the three kids were fighting a troll. In Loki's Wolves, trolls are basically walking, living piles of rocks (who masquerade as parts of Mount Rushmore during the day -- as a eyebrow, mustache, whatever). The kids have only one superpower each: The Thor kid can shoot power from his fist, Loki's kid is a werewolf, and the girl turned into a fish once. As the fight goes on, kids are "thrown across the clearing" (twice), get punched by a walking pile of rocks, get kicked twice by one (described as feeling like a "sledgehammer" hit him in the side), etc. But from every one of those "injuries", the kids stood up without a single effect. If one were hit twice in the side with a sledgehammer, ribs should be broken! At the very least! There is no indication before this that they don't feel pain or heal superfast or anything; one of them is a boxer, so if that kind of thing happened, it should have been discovered before this point.
So, if parents want to protect their kid from that kind of thing, this would be a great book series for them. Also, kids might not notice the lack of injuries, so they'd probably enjoy this just for the story.
(Book received free for review from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.)
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
There are young adult books that are good for both adult readers and for kids.
There are young adult books that are only good for young readers.
I can't give a book a bad rating because it falls into the latter category. I suspect young kids would enjoy this book series, though it didn't work for me (I gave up at the halfway point).
Loki's Wolves is set in the modern world, but in it Norse myths are real. The gods have died, but their children live on. Ragnarok (the final battle between Midgar the world-eating snake and the heroes) is on the horizon and one of each of the gods' children must team up to stop it.
The main characters in this first book are Thor's kid, Loki's kid, and a girl who as of the halfway point we hadn't found out who she was a child of (if any god, but she turned into a fish at one point, so it's quite likely that she's the great great great grandchild of one of the gods or of a trout).
The kids' first task was to find the rest of the children of the gods. Oh, and the adults are secretly against them because we think the end of the world would be a good thing -- since governments are corrupt, we want all life on earth to be destroyed so things can start over. I missed that memo.
My problem with the story (and why it might be good for young kids) is that there were no real (bad) consequences for their actions. In the last scene I read, the three kids were fighting a troll. In Loki's Wolves, trolls are basically walking, living piles of rocks (who masquerade as parts of Mount Rushmore during the day -- as a eyebrow, mustache, whatever). The kids have only one superpower each: The Thor kid can shoot power from his fist, Loki's kid is a werewolf, and the girl turned into a fish once. As the fight goes on, kids are "thrown across the clearing" (twice), get punched by a walking pile of rocks, get kicked twice by one (described as feeling like a "sledgehammer" hit him in the side), etc. But from every one of those "injuries", the kids stood up without a single effect. If one were hit twice in the side with a sledgehammer, ribs should be broken! At the very least! There is no indication before this that they don't feel pain or heal superfast or anything; one of them is a boxer, so if that kind of thing happened, it should have been discovered before this point.
So, if parents want to protect their kid from that kind of thing, this would be a great book series for them. Also, kids might not notice the lack of injuries, so they'd probably enjoy this just for the story.