Written by Andrew David MacDonald, When We Were Vikings follows Zelda, a girl on the autism spectrum, as she learns that her brother, Gert, the person in her tribe who does everything for her, has gotten into some trouble to try and keep them afloat.
This book has been compared to The Rosie Project and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Of the two, it is far closer to the later, as this is a real look at a lot of the dark parts of society. These siblings have lead very hard lives. Gert doesn’t have his GED, but he managed to get a full ride to go to school. With that, he still doesn’t have enough money to pay for everything for them, and he himself still struggles with a lot of things. His ex-girlfriend AK47 really brings the whole tribe together.
This isn’t a happy novel, but this is a really, really amazing novel. If you enjoy books that look at things that we don’t really like to acknowledge as being true, this is a great book.
If you aren’t in this world – where it’s a struggle to know where the money is going to come from to pay for food the next month, where you live with someone who, because of your parent’s choices, has to deal with everything being that much harder for them and people not knowing how to interact with them – it’s really easy to pretend like these aren’t real things. While I don’t think this particular story has actually happened, it could.
And this is kind of what makes this novel so great.
With that, it is written from Zelda’s point of view. So it isn’t written in a “normal” fashion, and could be an issue when a reader is working their way through this. Just to be aware.
I was given a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
This novel will be out Jan 2020
