Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Hammer of Thor by: Rick Riordan

 

While Rick Riordan’s previous trilogy, The Kane Chronicles, failed by attempting to setup a story right in book one for the trilogy to follow but then running out of interesting ideas at the end of the second book, The Hammer of Thor, the second book in Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard avoids this as The Sword of Summer ends with the idea of Ragnarök still coming, but Magnus content to face it.  The Hammer of Thor picks up, like many of Riordan’s sequels, sometime after the events of the first book where Magnus has had a chance to really acclimatize to his afterlife existence at Hotel Valhalla which makes for an interesting new status quo.  Magnus was used to simply living on the streets with no stability, and putting him in a situation of stability is interesting as Riordan still sets him up as wandering Boston when he gets the chance or the fact that he ends up going hiking in the woods to relieve stress while preparing for the end of the world.  Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard is a series where it seems that Loki and his trickster nature is where everything that Riordan attempts to do works really well.  Loki in many interpretations due to an association with snakes is often interpreted as a Satanic figure, and while he is cast in the villain here, he is more of the mythic trickster figure of mythology than any attempt to be Satan.  Throughout The Hammer of Thor his presence is felt, guiding and nudging characters in the right direction and eventually getting them right into a corner so that his goals can actually be achieved without anyone realizing it until it is too late.  Riordan also makes an important decision in not making Loki’s plans simply being the end of the world like Apophis’ plans were in The Kane Chronicles.

 

Like many of his other books Riordan takes inspiration from various myths to retell them in interesting ways, most obviously the story of Utgard-Loki (no relation to Loki) and the theft of Thor’s hammer (hence the title), though by this point Riordan has mastered not simply retelling the myths but integrating his characters into the myth.  For example, in the theft of Thor’s hammer, Thor has to “marry” a giant who demands his wife’s hand in marriage and he disguises himself as his wife with Loki’s help, before allowing wholesale slaughter to get his hammer back.  While there is trickery involved in The Hammer of Thor much of the drama in the retelling comes from it being a looming threat where Sam has to be the one to marry a giant, something that comes into conflict with not only her personal worldview, but her religious worldview.  The eventual resolution involving her sibling (through Loki) taking her place while she stays off to the side, but it remains this looming threat throughout the book, especially as Sam is a character who struggles under the control of her father which is an interesting plotline as the climax sees her start to form a resistance.  Riordan is smart not to pull the usual young adult trope of a protagonist suddenly overcoming everything on an early try, as Sam is only able to resist Loki enough to not die at his command.  Riordan also goes into a bit more depth at how her religious faith can play into the fact that this is a world where gods are real and technically it’s the polytheists who have it right.  As mythological deities are seen as dead faiths, the living faiths are still endorsed by Riordan as worthwhile and requiring faith, something that he will not be tackling for good reason.  Though Magnus still being an atheist is weird as he is the son of a god.  I think Riordan wants to equate atheism with being nonreligious which is a bit over simplified: yes, atheists are generally nonreligious but not always.  Atheists just don’t believe in a god.

 

Magnus also gets some interesting development here as this is a book where his sarcastic façade actually breaks down and you get this idea of Magnus Chase as the person who loves everybody and genuinely cares a lot.  There is this softness underneath the hard exterior which is really fitting for a narrator and allowing our main character to be willing to become vulnerable is something Riordan hasn’t done before, at least not in this way.  The sarcasm is still there, the chapter titles especially are very metatextual and self-aware that this is a story being told.  There is also an effort to replicate a five man band structure with the story as all of the characters end up going in and out for most of the narrative with people getting sidetracked and brought back in right before the climax.  The most important character to be introduced is Alex Fierro, a child of Loki, who serves as a romantic interest for Magnus, though he doesn’t actually ever outright say there is a relationship between the pair.  At the end there is this understanding between them that is unspoken, yet incredibly important development.  Alex is genderfluid, and as a child of Loki that literally means changing Alex’s appearance and not at will (I’m avoiding the use of pronouns because both he and she are used, but there is a specification that in this instance they is not appropriate), yet Magnus becomes the only character apart from Alex at the end of the novel to recognize what gender Alex is expressing at a given point, even if he doesn’t quite get what that means.  Riordan is does an interesting thing in writing how it is not important to understand someone who is non-cis, but to give them the basic human decency in interactions with that person.  Alex can also genuinely shapeshift, uses a garrot, and could probably murder you if you gave Alex the chance.

 

Overall, there’s something very special about The Hammer of Thor.  It introduces this interesting dynamic and moves the trilogy forward in a much better way than The Kane Chronicles did.  It also hits on a more emotional level than The Sword of Summer did with Riordan setting it apart from the other books he has written and given the characters something to grasp onto with a raising of the stakes for the end of the trilogy.  9/10.