



Black Shield Maiden
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From Willow Smith and Jess Hendel comes a powerful and groundbreaking historical saga about an African warrior in the world of the Vikings.
“Intimate, tender, and fiercely epic.”—Tomi Adeyemi, author of Children of Blood and Bone
Lore, legend, and history tell us of the Vikings: warrior kings on epic journeys of conquest and plunder. But the stories we know are not the only stories to tell. There is another story, one that has been lost to the mists of time: the saga of the dark queen.
This saga begins with Yafeu, a defiant yet fiercely compassionate young warrior who is stolen from her home in the flourishing Ghānaian empire and taken to a distant kingdom in the North. There she is thrust into a strange, cold world of savage shield maidens, tyrannical rulers, and mysterious gods.
And there she also finds something unexpected: a kindred spirit. She comes to serve Freydis, a shy princess who couldn’t be more different from the confident and self-possessed Yafeu.
But they both want the same thing: to forge their own fate. Yafeu inspires Freydis to dream of a future greater than the one that the king and queen have forced upon her. And with the princess at her side, Yafeu learns to navigate this new world and grows increasingly determined to become one of the legendary shield maidens—to fight not only for her freedom but for the freedom of others.
Yafeu may have lost her home, but she still knows who she is, and she’s not afraid to be the flame that burns a city to the ground so a new world can rise from the ashes. She will alter the course of history—and become the revolutionary heroine of her own myth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Singer-actor Smith and screenwriter Hendel debut with a sweeping historical fantasy epic combining African and Nordic lore. In Ghana, heroine Yafeu, named for her now absent father and taught by him—as a boy would have been—that "belief is power," accepts her tutelary spirit, a painted wolf, just before her village is razed and she's abducted by slavers. After a horrendous desert journey, she's rescued by a ferocious female Viking and brought as a slave to a pagan Norse village where she despairs of ever achieving the great destiny her mother predicted for her. Eventually she becomes a servant to Freydis, the local king's daughter. As the women grow close and share their African and Norse heritages, they see in the blend of their two cultures a path to overthrowing their barbaric male-dominated society. Though ambitiously loaded with snippets of Scandinavian and African history and mythology shaped to the authors' feminist orientation, the story does not quite convince. Little anachronisms (a warrior dressed in plate armor rather than ring mail) will throw off the historically minded, while cartoonish male villains weaken the empowerment plot. Still, fans of Norse fantasy frustrated with the genre's overwhelming whiteness will appreciate this refreshing take on the milieu.
Customer Reviews
Amazing!
This book is extraordinarily hard to put down! I was afraid to go to sleep and miss something! THATS how exciting this storytelling is! The plots twists were constantly moving the goal posts of my expectations! I love Willow as an artist and I love this book!