Review: Islands of the Blessed by Nancy Farmer

The malevolent spirit of a vengeful mermaid is wreaking havoc on Jack’s village and it’s up to him, the old Bard and Thorgil to confront and vanquish the restless draugr. But the task will not be easy and the three find themselves travelling once more with Thorgil’s Northman brother and his crew in to the most dangerous of waters. Their quest to right old wrongs leads them from a village plagued by a hogboon to the fin folk land of Notland and via every danger in between.  Can they escape the perils they face and return in time to help the undead-spirit find peace.

This is the third and final volume of Nancy Farmer’s trilogy, but fear not, if you haven’t read the previous two. Apart from a slightly slow, scene setting start, the story rips along at a brisk pace and the back history is fed in subtly but sufficiently tantalisingly to make the reader want to go back and read the other two novels.

As the blurb indicates this is a quest, and a fine one too, that weaves a variety of folk tale heroes and monsters into a believable historical setting. A well-read Year 6 or 7 will recognise several names: Hengist, and Beowulf, amongst them and the less familiar (such as the Shoney or St Columba) are explained in the Appendix.  There’s also a fair amount of social history, with the cultural differences between the Northmen raiders and the Saxon farmers handled in an often light-hearted and always entertaining way, and the depiction of the monks’ asceticism is deadly.

My only complaint is that the quest actually finishes four-fifths of the way through the book, the final 90 pages or so being dedicated to a sort of tying up of loose ends and sealing of the protagonists’ fates. And the final sentence, frankly, made this reader cringe! 

It’s a shame that the book tailed off like this because the resolution of the quest is a bit of a jaw dropper and the book is well worth the read for that alone.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk