Odd and the Frost Giants

Odd winked down at the boy, as Thor had once winked at him, and turned around and, leaning on his carved staff, limped through the village, which already seemed much too small for him and not just because he had grown so much since he had left. Soon the ice would melt and longships would be sailing. He did not imagine anyone would refuse him a berth on a ship. Not now that he was big. They would need a good pair of hands on the oars, after all. Nor would they argue if he chose to bring a passenger…

He reached down and knocked on the door of the house in which he had been born. And when his mother opened the door, before she could hug him, before she could cry and laugh and cry once more, before she could offer him food and exclaim over how big he had grown and how fast children do spring up when they are out of your sight, before any of these things could happen, Odd said, “Hello, Mother. How would you like to go back to Scotland? For a while, at least.”

“That would be a fine thing,” she said.

And Odd smiled, and ducked his head to get through the door, and went inside.

NEIL GAIMAN writes books. Some of them are for adults, like American Gods, and some of them are comics, like the Sandman series, and some of them have pictures, like Crazy Hair and Blueberry Girl. He was awarded the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book. (Hello.) Other awards he has won include the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award and, hardest to spell, the Mythopoeic Award. (I bet you could win awards just for spelling Mythopoeic correctly.) His books Coraline and Stardust were made into films. (Does anyone read these biographies?) He is practically fifty years old and has three children. (Help, I am being held prisoner.) He wears lots of black clothes and probably needs a haircut. (They make us write these biographies of authors all day.) He wrote Odd and the Frost Giants for World Book Day in the UK, and thinks there are more stories about Odd he would like to tell. Visit him online at www.mousecircus.com.

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Jacket art © 2009 by Brett Helquist

Jacket design by Hilary Zarycky

ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS. Text copyright © 2009 by Neil Gaiman. Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Brett Helquist. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196487-9

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