Viking Warrior Rising

by Asa Maria Bradley

November 3, 2015 · Sourcebooks Casablanca

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Harper Gray. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best First Book, Paranormal Romance category.

Here is Harper Gray's review:

I chose this book under ‘Best First Book’ rather than ‘Best Paranormal Romance,’ and that pretty well summarises some of the more technical problems I had with it. The pacing problems, jarring (often unnecessary) exposition, inconsistency of voice, and slightly clumsy ending sequence that I experienced here are, in my experience, pretty typical first-book problems. But this book also bugged me in several ways that I’m less sanguine about.

First, though, let’s talk about the elephant – or indeed the berserkr – in the room. Viking Warrior Rising has a lot of variations on “The Sagas tell us” or “The Eddas tell us”. No. No, they do not. In fact, the sources are all pretty vague about berserkers and valkyries – so much so that scholars still debate exactly who they were and what they did. Much of what we know regarding ‘Norse mythology’ comes from the Poetic (or Elder) Edda and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, or from the fornaldarsögur (or Legendary Sagas, literally “Sagas of the Old Times”). With the (debatable) exception of the Poetic Edda, these all postdate the conversion to Christianity considerably. The debate over just how much what we think of as ‘Norse mythology’ would have been recognisable to the people whose belief system it underpinned remains pretty heated. This is a really long-winded way of saying that, beyond the book’s claims that the Sagas and Eddaic literature say something or prophesy something that they really do not, I was not bothered in the least by Bradley’s interpretation of the mythological characters. She was consistent, her world-building was solid, and the story always managed to follow its own rules.

(That being said, it is ironic and a little bit funny that this particular warrior band is Swedish. In the Sagas there appear a few brutish, villainous berserkir who are Swedish, in contrast to the main characters, who are usually Norwegian or Icelandic (most of the Saga literature comes from Iceland and Norway). A friend who recently defended his dissertation on berserkir convincingly argued against the “brutish Swedish berserkr” as a trope, but seeing a Swedish berserker as a romantic hero made me smile nevertheless.)

So, plus one each for world-building and in-book mythology.

A huge minus one for female characters, though. There were three: our petite, non-Nordic heroine, and the valkyries Irja, who is Sámi, and Astrid, the walking Swedish stereotype. Astrid frustrated me because she felt like the mouthpiece of we-the-Swedes; though perhaps this would have struck me as less unnecessary had I not lived several years in Sweden. In any case, she seemed to serve very little function beyond her stereotype and being a source of intimidation to Naya.

But Astrid didn’t bother me nearly as much as Irja. Her purpose in the narrative appeared to be the only other non-Swede in the compound, and thus a source of companionship for Naya and a possessor of semi-mystical science knowledge. She is frequently ‘othered’ by the Swedish members of the warrior band, to the point that she is suspected of treason on the convincing grounds of ‘she’s not one of us.’ This isn’t super awesome to begin with, but the cavalier attitude that the story takes towards Irja’s Sámi identity showed a lack of sensitivity that surprised me, and not in a good way. Irja is described as Sámi, then Finnish, as though the descriptors are synonymous. For an extremely brief snapshot of why plonking a Sámi or Finnish valkyrie in the middle of the story just as something kind of cool discomforted me: Part of Sápmi is in Finland, and the Sagas often refer to the Sámi as finnar, but a Sámi person is not necessarily Finnish, nor is a Finnish person necessarily Sámi; both ethnic identities would carry considerable backstory, particularly among a group of Swedes. The Sámi have suffered centuries of discrimination and disruption of their way of life from the governments of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia; the pan-national Sámi Council was only founded in 1956 and even in 2016 the Sámi are still fighting legal battles where the ‘rhetoric of race biology’ is a pressing issue. Finland, on the other hand, was a part of Sweden since the Middle Ages (although later than any of the characters were alive, um, the first time around) and was ceded to Russia in 1809. Swedish was, for many years, the dominant high-status language in Finland. Although it hasn’t been the high-status language for a long time, Swedish is still a mandatory subject in Finnish schools. With the rise of Finnish nationalism in the 19th century, and especially with Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917, the status of Swedish in Finland has been hotly contested, and remains so today. In 2013, a petition advanced by Finnish nationalists to stop the mandatory teaching of Swedish got enough signatures to be debated in parliament, although in 2015 the Finnish parliament voted overwhelmingly to defeat the proposal.

Does this mean that a Sámi woman or a Finnish woman cannot work together with a collection of Swedes? Certainly not. Of course she can. But this warrior band has been hanging around for the majority of the twentieth century. Irja will have been experiencing microaggressions from her bandmates at the same time as her people – whether Finnish or Sámi – gradually began to reassert their ethnic identities and independence. Even when they were all alive, groups of Vikings extracted tax from the finnar, and in the Sagas Sámi women are occasionally presented as dangerous sorceresses. Seeing, then, Irja used (possibly even exploited) as the magic healer lady made me wonder: How would Irja navigate her ethnic identity? How does she see herself in relation to her Swedish companions? These uncomfortable undertones – especially when it came to ‘she’s not one of us’ – made me wonder just how much tension is really simmering under the surface here, but Bradley seems to use Irja’s ethnic identity as a character trait (or worse, quirk), and then forget about it until it’s convenient again. I find it difficult to expect that these tensions could be hand-waved away so easily, especially in the last two centuries, and as the book went on I found her Magical Ethereal Foreigner act increasingly difficult to put up with.

Naya herself is apparently a super-soldier of the Captain America variety (though created by the bad guys), but with the exception of a fight scene here or there, there’s very little practical evidence for her super-soldier-ness. It appears when it’s convenient, and disappears when it’s not. She’s not even relieved during sexytimes that she doesn’t have to hold back on her strength because of Leif’s own superhuman…ness. Her concern for her brother is touching, but I didn’t get an ounce of her having genuine feelings for Leif. She literally meets the divine when they have sex, but ultimately she enters to a relationship with him because if she doesn’t…she’s a terrible person?

Well, really, if she doesn’t then his inner warrior spirit will take over, he’ll be beyond his own or anyone else’s control, and gosh darn she was so selfish not to consider that he was holding her prisoner for his own—Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that part. Yeah, he held her on house arrest and fed her half-information because she needed to fall in love with him for this doodad to work. The foundation for a solid relationship is apparently holding someone captive in a fortress. Mutual trust is so passé.

Leif has at least a little bit more of a personality, but with his inner warrior spirit hungering after Naya so much, I kind of wondered exactly which one of them was in love with her, and which one she needed to be in love with for this själsfrände thing (actual Swedish for soul mate, in case anyone was wondering) to work. How horrible must that be for someone, if their inner spirit falls in love with a person and they go through all the trouble of essentially tricking their partner into falling in love, but they themselves aren’t in love at all? It didn’t seem that Leif loving Naya was at all a precursor to taming the beast within, so to speak. But I guess this is a variation on that ‘fated mate’ thing that I see mentioned in paranormals so often. It didn’t come across as terribly convincing here.

But Naya escapes her prison – sorry, her beloved zombie Viking’s untraceable fortress home – to, um, do stuff.

This ending is really weird considering some revelations about the weasel-creatures that attack Leif at the beginning of the book. They are apparently Loki’s creatures, but they came from the same lab as Naya, and they recognise her. The last clause of the spoiler tag up there confused the living daylights out of me in this regard; it seemed stupid and short-sighted, especially if Loki is gaining strength.

The Vikings in Leif’s warrior band – all of whom are revived inhabitants of Valhalla – are, as a group, not super clever. They’ve had at least a century to get used to adapting to change, yet they still fall for really obvious ploys.

When I read the blurb I thought I was going to get a Viking Age novel, not a revived-to-the-present Viking and super-human suspense novel. I’m not disappointed on that score; I’m disappointed that it started so well and then didn’t seem able to follow through on the promising beginning. The insertions of Swedish felt more out of place than atmospheric, and I thought it really strange that they would call Leif their king, and not their chief or leader. I think that Bradley’s narrative voice will likely smooth out in future books; she’s clearly a clever and capable writer. But I found the characters all pretty bland, the romance totally unconvincing and bordering on Stockholm Syndrome, and Irja, the most compelling of the Good Guys, pretty much thrown away both as a person and as a character.