When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald

When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald
Simon and Schuster, January 2020
Audiobook (10 hours) read by Phoebe Strole

Courage is what makes a hero out of Zelda, a slightly-built 21-year-old White woman with a cognitive disability.

After their mother dies of cancer, Gert assumes care for his younger sister Zelda. People assume Gert is a thug on account of his looks, and he has in fact teamed up with some unsavoury characters in order to make ends meet financially, but he is also attending college on a scholarship. Zelda is obsessed with Vikings, and she sees the world through a Viking filter. Her voice is unique and appealing.

        In many legends, where heroes had to defeat powerful villains, the villains always hurt innocent people who the hero loved. And once a hero is pushed too far by the villain, the hero goes to battle. The hero in a Viking legend is always smaller than the villain. That is what makes it a legend.

Promotional blurbs and reviews have compared this book to The Silver Linings Playbook, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Those comparisons will give you a fair idea of the kind of feel-good story this is, told in first person by a disadvantaged person overcoming great odds. 

The problem for me is that I couldn't quite believe in Zelda as a real person, adorable as she is. The real people that I know with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder are not so perfectly innocent and altruistic as Zelda. She does, however, need rules. Sometimes stress causes her thoughts to become disordered:

        Shhh! I told my thoughts. Stop flying around. Stop trying to smash yourselves against the inside of my head. They kept flying, since I had to think to say to stop. Thinking more just made the thoughts flying around louder and louder. They were gunshots and exploding bombs.

Zelda navigates sexual attraction, her first job and increasing levels of independence. There are also Grendel monsters in the form of bad men in her world, men who steal treasure hoards and act dishonourably. Zelda is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect the people she loves.

Giller chances: LOW - Lots of readers (and audiobook listeners) will enjoy this heartwarming story, however.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.