Review: Sky in the Deep

Sky in the Deep by Adrienne Young
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have so many conflicting feelings about this book. While the setting is, in some ways refreshing and unique- a pre-Viking era unspecified region of Scandinavia, probably Norway, based on fjord descriptions- the actual story, though well-written, bothered me.

Eeylen is a seventeen-year-old girl fighting with her fellow clansmen, the Aska, in a fjord region called Aurvanger (making me have weird associations with World of Warcraft and The Maelstrom…). Every five years, the Aska clan fight the Riki clan, due to a blood feud between the two clans. Eeylen, though injured and in pain, takes on Fiske, a large Riki man, and is saved from being killed by her brother, Iri, who supposedly died in the clash that took place five years earlier. Eeylen’s family unit, consisting of her father and her friend Mýra, believe she saw Iri's ghost, who was protecting her, and that her seeing the ghost was a gift from the clan's patron goddess, Sigr (Old Norse for Victory). Eeylen, however, firmly believes that she saw her brother alive and now a grown man. She has already suffered the loss of her mother to the merciless Herja tribe. (Herja is a complex word in Scandinavian/Estonian culture meaning variously villain, demon, to wage war, to plunder, in the Faroese, Finnish, and old Icelandic languages.) This echo of Iri's loss troubles her deeply. How was what she saw just a ghost?

It turns out that Eeylen is correct because, in a subsequent battle near Aurvanger, Eeylen sees Iri again, follows after him, and is captured by the Riki, who by the way, follow the goddess Thora (Old Norse related to þora, meaning To Dare, and whose totem is a bear). Eeylen is shot in the shoulder with an arrow by Fiske, who, we are assured repeatedly, did this to save her from death, as a sort of favor to Iri, who is now fighting with the Riki, against his former clan the Aska, who left him to die after he and Fiske fell off a ledge fighting, five years before. After capturing Eeylen, Fiske buys her from his clan and makes her a dýr (a slave, but literally from the Old Norse and Icelandic, an animal), a loss of honor which will bar her from entering Sólbjǫrg, a sort of Heaven/ Valhöll, “the hall of the fallen.” The mystical story of how Iri came to live among the Riki and Fiske's family shocks and angers Eeylen. And she is ashamed to be a dýr. But Fiske and Iri plan to let her escape after the thaw, to her home village of Hylli. In spite of this possibility, Eeylen thinks of escaping under treacherous winter conditions many times, to recover her honor, and to get away from her traitor brother, Iri. And yet, life among Fiske’s family is not so very bad. She forms a genuine attachment to Fiske’s younger brother Halvard. She begins to like Fiske’s mother, Inge. She begins to like Fiske, too. I would call it Stockholm Syndrome (sorry guys) but it would be bad form. The whole point that Young is seeking to make is that moment when you realize that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and that your friend is not so different from you. It’s a book about forging bonds to make something new.

This is a violent book, with vivid gore. It is also a book in which we have a seriously injured teenager who repeatedly takes up arms, in spite of ripping open sutures in her wrists, in spite of burns on her neck, in spite of a suppurating wound through her shoulder (where are her fevers, her septicemia, from this festering injury?), and thus very unrealistic. It is also a book with shimmering moments like Fiske and Eeylen’s encounter with a bear. And a book with trope-y moments in which again and again, guys rescue our heroine and she falls in love! There were things I loved, like Eeylen’s honorable instincts to protect a child who trusts her, and things I disliked, as in why, to me as a reader, Fiske still feels stoic to the point of blandness with Eeylen, or the entire concept of someone falling in love with their captor. While I get the abuses that Eeylen suffers are in part because of her fighting nature and the need of Fiske and his family to create a convincing picture of her being a dýr, I have grave misgivings about books for young people that plant the seed of an idea that your captor is really okay and lovable.

In any case, a writer to watch. Even if I was not sold on aspects of the plot, Adrienne Young can write.

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

View all my reviews