Joanne Harris - Runemarks

Right, I really came unstuck with this one. I started reading it back in August last year and didn’t finish it for a good six months. I had some time off and was reading a lot but when I got home I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again.

Runemarks supposedly follows the story of Maddy Smith, a girl with magical powers who lives in a village with normal people. She ends up going on an adventure with some characters based on Norse Gods and ends up saving the world from the evil of Christianity – at least that’s how the story portrays its antagonists.

Now, the first reason I couldn’t keep picking the book up – I didn’t really like any of the characters, even those based on Odin and the like from Norse mythology which is something I normally like as a setting for a story. I understand it’s supposed to be an original take but it come across as Norse history meets the Jungle Book where Maddy is Moglie and the other characters are there to be comedic versions of their real selves.

Because of this I actually did some research to see if it was just me once again reading a book that isn’t intended for my eyes... but then I thought about it. The book is intended for kids and the writing style, story structure and word usage feels slightly too advanced. In my opinion, it’s too advanced for smaller children and condescending for teens.

Moving on to the writing style, I found it very sparse in terms of what’s going on and there is such a lack of description that I couldn’t help but picture the world as a linear path that the characters walk along. In some places, there are jumps in time which make it feel like whole paragraphs are missing. Also, when reading chapters, the perspective changes from one paragraph to the next without warning which makes it hard to keep up with what’s actually going on and who’s perspective the story is being told from.

The last part of the writing that bugged me was the last 40 or so pages of the 504 page offering where the last few scenes whiz by after what a massively dragged out build up. Lots of books seem to do this, like authors are trying to reach a certain length of book and then hammer out the ‘best bits’ in relative seconds. But I found I didn’t care what was happening in Runemarks and was glad to be done with it.

I did make some other observations about certain character actions that I didn’t think were in keeping with their intended behaviour but I don’t think I’m in a position to provide my thoughts on this as I didn’t invest in any of the characters. To me, it was not an engaging read.

Runemakes by Joanne Harris was published by Doubleday in 2007. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)