Freya and the Magic Jewel (Thunder Girls, #1)

by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

You can read more of my reviews at my blog Pages Unbound.

As a fan of Holub's and Williams's Grimmtastic Girls series, I had to check out their new books based on Norse Mythology: Thunder Girls.   The premise is basically the same as Grimmtastic Girls and Goddess Girls (which is based on Greek mythology): young versions of  mythological/fictional characters attend school together (here, Asgard Academy) and short adventures ensue, with each book focused on a different main character.  A loose overarching plot vaguely ties things together.

Although I was excited about Thunder Girls because I am interested in Norse mythology but actually don't know that much about it, I think the audience's lack of familiarity with the subject matter is a downfall here. Holub and Suzanne know this is likely to be unfamiliar territory for a lot of readers, so there's a lot of background information.  They have to explain not only who the main god/goddess/giant/elf/dwarf/human characters are but also the structure of the world, the geography, the general mythology, etc.  I definitely feel more informed, but I'm not 100% convinced I read a great story.

And I was even less convinced I'd read a great story when it very suddenly ended.  I actually hadn't realized that there was a main plot point that had been solved because I was expecting to reach the climax of the book when BOOM! I was reading the acknowledgements.  (In my defense, it was a ebook, and I had no idea what percentage of the book was supposed to be left.)  Suffice to say, this may not be my favorite book by these two authors.

However, I do like the Grimmtastic Girls series, and I have enough faith in the authors that I think this book might just suffer from being the first in the series. These are chapter books, not upper middle grade, so they're meant for a fairly young audience and need to be kind of short.  The authors used up a lot of their space giving out background information in this first book, which is fair considering most of their audience won't really know anything about Norse mythology (kids this young probably even haven't seen the Thor movies from Marvel).  So I have some optimism here, and I think the rest of the series has the potential to be quite strong. My library has the ebook for book 2, so I may be checking it out soon.