Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs is a debut fantasy reimagining of Beowulf featuring a heroine with a disability (4/5 stars)

Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs is a debut fantasy reimagining of Beowulf featuring a heroine with a disability. The audiobook version is narrated by Victoria Fox.

Though the daughter of a lord, Fryda has longed to become a shield maiden, in part to follow in her uncle Beowulf’s footsteps. Assuming her dream was shattered after an accident in her teens, at age twenty she has started to feel an uncontrollable power rising within herself. And deep below, buried in her gilded lair, the last dragon is drawn to Fryda’s untamed power and begins to wake from a long and cursed sleep.

In college I studied Beowulf a few times, including memorizing the opening stanza. Thanks in part to that, that epic poem has a fond place in my heart. Shield Maiden focuses on the very tail end of the epic, during the 50th year of King Beowulf’s reign.

Emmerichs did a great job with this reimagining! I inhaled the audiobook within 24 hours. The narrator, Victoria Fox, does a pretty great job here. There were a few character voices that sounded a bit similar to me, but overall I greatly enjoyed the listen. And take a look at this cover, it’s GORGEOUS and has so much detail. I love it.

As someone who likes history, and studied this time period in college, I really enjoyed the detail in these pages. There is a lot of description of the buildings, clothing, and oral storytelling of the Geats.

Overall I did like the prose, but the plot was a little meandering. There were some scenes that felt like jump cuts from where we were just before. Fryda is also a bit too naïve. The point-of-view shifts around a lot as well; I typically prefer either full chapters of one POV, or less jumping around.

There’s a good amount of diversity here. Fryda does not have full use of one of her hands, after falling into a chasm during an earthquake when she was thirteen. Her childhood friend, Theow, is coded as suffering from PTSD when he smells smoke he is not expecting. Fryda’s best friend Hild is a black indentured servant whose people initially hailed from Romans in sub-Saharan Africa.

I’d recommend this one to anyone who has a fondness to Beowulf, or who liked books like Grendel by John Gardener or Claire North’s Songs of Penelope series.

CW: violence, gore, drug and alcohol abuse, assault, sexual harassment

I received a copy of this book to review. Thank you to Redhook and NetGalley for the audio review copy. All opinions contained herein are my own.

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