Viking Terror

Deborah Dowson is a Canadian children’s librarian living in Harvard,
Massachusetts.

In this sequel to Viking Quest (2001), Rigg and his friend Ari, who are
now in Greenland, set out to track a wolf and find themselves in the
Sacred Valley of the Nine, a place where their Norse ancestors made
sacrifices to appease the gods. Nara, a native Greenland girl who seems
to posses shape-shifting powers, ambushes them in a nearby cave. The
boys offer to help her find her way home in exchange for their freedom,
but when they return to their village they are placed in the middle of a
religious controversy. The Christians want to take Nara home, but the
Old Norse faction wants to sacrifice her to the gods. All is resolved as
Nara is returned to her people and Rigg is able to rescue his own father
at the same time.

There is little action, let alone terror, in this story whose purpose
is to present the environment, belief systems, and social conditions of
Norse settlers in Greenland in the early 11th century. The hero of the
story is a thoughtful young man who is more prone to reflect on the past
and to speculate about the future than to act boldly, so that when he
finally takes up arms against the villain it seems unlikely and out of
character for him. There is the threat of trouble and intrigue from the
beginning, but the central philosophical conflict doesn’t provide
enough excitement to get the plot moving. The title is misleading and
will disappoint young readers looking for an action-packed historical
adventure story. Not a first-choice purchase.