by Jonathan Stroud
Halli loves to listen to stories of the old days when adventure and heroism was the order of the day rather than farming. He's a younger son and short and he's searching for a purpose in life and not finding it easy. Along with Aud the two of them discover more about the valley and the legends tha...
Four stars for writing (OH the way it mimicked the tone of Anglo-Saxon and Norse sagas!) but two stars for content.
Man, what a bummer. I was very much looking forward to this, having just read Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, and I was very much enjoying it, until the end, which basically stank. There really was a lot of potential here, and based onhis previous work, Stroud could have done something with it, but som...
Heroes of the Valley turned out to be a good book to listen on audio. At first I wasn't sure how much I'd like it, but I ended up enjoying it immensely.Halli is a roguish, endearing young hero who wrapped himself around my heart. Although he was quite a prankster, he was a good kid at heart. He di...
Stroud's best book.This a fantasy set in an isolated valley above a fjord where farming and feuding are the primary occupations. The culture is based on what can be found in Icelandic sagas, complete with a heavy emphasis on legal disputes. The protagonist, a boy with a quick wit and a way with word...
I very much enjoyed this book. In style, it reminded me quite a lot of books by Howard Pyle and retellings of Viking legends that I read as a child. However, this book is much more morally and ethically ambiguous. It provides the reader with a lot of food for thought without handing out predigested ...
That was a rather nice read. Halli and Aud are great characters, both feeling like the "odd one out" in their respective communities, which makes it so much easier to feel for them. :o)
Pretty mediocre fare through most of the book but a very surprise ending (at least to me). The world was a little different and the characters strongly drawn and believable but I struggled through it because frankly, none of the characters were very likable. I remember thinking that about the first ...
I'm always delighted with Jonathan Stroud's ability to immediately set a tone and basic assumptions of the book's world. Heroes of the Valley has some resonance with Stroud's other single-volume young adult novels, though it has more of an explicit fantasy-genre style (with an undertone of horror th...
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