Heimdall Thunderhammer

This is a cute story, with simple but endearing illustrations. Alas, it seemed too heavily flavoured by Redwall to truly capture my full attention. The story is fairly standard - a heroic Spearhog, Herod (which I think is supposed to be a porcupine, although they are neither related to hedgehogs nor can fire their quills, so maybe not) and his elementally-skilled mouse companion, Clove, are set on finding a hidden temple whilst being pursued by angry rats. Despite the fact that the rats are following them in a destructive, cannibalistic wave, Herod deems their mission more important than the lives of many poor forest dwellers tht get caught up in it, along the way (including a village of colourful birds). This viewpoint is later changed, and Herod certainly proves his worth.

Anyhow, the other two characters are a mouse, Durbin, and his hedgehog friend, Morro. These two are a destructive force of their own, as Durbin tricks his naive young friend into disturbing the lives of the poor villages as much as possible - from wanton vandalism to thievery. When they stumble upon Herod and Clove, Durbin develops an interest in the young mouse maid, and persuades his gullible friend to join him - first in finding them and then in joining their party. Along for the ride is a bold and brash young squirrel, and his "dragon" companion. The rats are suitably nasty, and also relatively bumbling, a few reasonable tacticians and our band of heroes would have been dinner. There is also, of course, an open ending to lure readers into buying the sequel.

One thing I did find quite off-putting was the typos, always a challenge in self-published novel - there were various places where words were missing, or quotation marks, one "you're" instead of "your" that made me shudder, and the author appears to lack the ability to spell "entrails" consistently - getting it right on 1 out of 3 occasions (also "endtrails" and "endtries"). Thus the novel could do with another, more thorough, proofread.

Overall, a cute read for Redwall fans who are mourning the lack of further stories, but no real surprises and I found the irresponsible nature of the main protagonist somewhat off-putting. I know it is supposed to show his impulsive, feckless nature, but I could not help but feel terrible for the poor lady whose crop he demolished and the following trail of destruction. He does, however, show a certain growth in maturity as the story progresses.… (meer)