By Joanne Harris
Five hundred years after Ragnarok, a fourteen-year-old girl marked with a forbidden rune gets pulled into a struggle between the ruined Norse gods, a magic-hunting Order, and Chaos itself.
It's been five hundred years since Ragnarok, and the Norse gods are broken, scattered, and mostly forgotten. A grim church called the Order rules now, and it has driven the old magic underground. Fourteen-year-old Maddy Smith gets treated as a freak in her village because of the ruinmark burned onto her hand, a rune that marks her as something the Order fears. Her one real friend is a wandering one-eyed man who turns out to be far more than he looks. When he sends her down into the goblin-riddled world beneath the hill to fetch a relic, Maddy is swept into a huge, twisting fight between the surviving gods, the Order, and Chaos itself, a journey that eventually reaches the land of the dead. It's long and dense, closer to adult fantasy than most of what's here, and built for an older reader who wants Norse myth turned into a full epic.
This one is for your oldest, strongest reader, the one whose love of Norse myth has turned into an appetite for a real doorstopper. Joanne Harris knows the myths cold, and she rebuilds them into a dense, inventive world with its own rules, so a reader gets the gods they already love, Odin, Loki, Hel, cast in wholly new roles. It's long, layered, and demanding, much closer to adult fantasy than the lighter books nearby, which is exactly why it lands for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old who's ready to be handed something serious. There's a sequel waiting too, if it takes.