By Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman's warm little Norse fable: a limping Viking boy runs off into the endless winter and ends up helping Odin, Thor and Loki win back Asgard from a Frost Giant.
Odd is a Viking boy whose father drowned on a raid and whose leg was crushed under a falling tree, so he limps and doesn't much fit his cold village. When one long winter refuses to end, he slips away to his father's old woodcutting hut in the forest. There he shares his food with a fox, an eagle and a great brown bear, and then the fox begins to talk: the three animals are really Loki, Odin and Thor, tricked out of their shapes and shut out of Asgard by a Frost Giant who has taken the city and the spring. So Odd sets off, limping across the frozen land with the gods at his side, to walk back into Asgard and outwit the giant who is holding their home and the spring.
For a child who already loves Thor and Loki, this is the gentlest possible door into the actual Norse gods as characters rather than facts. Gaiman keeps it short, funny and warm, and the hero isn't a warrior at all, he's a quiet boy with a bad leg who wins by staying calm and being kind, which lands with any child who has ever felt like the smallest one in the room. It reads aloud beautifully over a couple of nights, and Chris Riddell's silvery drawings carry the cold and the magic of it.