Note: I know the author of this book socially.
The Golden Wolf!!! I think this was my favorite book of the series. Part of this is that Einar and Ivar, Ragnvald's sons by his former concubine and his wife, have such a great half-brothers relationship that you know cannot end well but is just devastating to watch as it develops. And then once you suffer through the loss that was inevitable, the life Einar manages to carve out is truly my favorite thing in the whole series. He suffers loss because everyone in this world must experience that, it is life, but he really does get a happy ending after all that, and it feels fully deserved. The final hundred pages of this book may be my favorite section of this entire trilogy.
I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy a novel about The Next Generation after a fairly substantial time jump, but I shouldn't have worried: I found it really compelling, and exactly what this sort of full life cycle trilogy demanded. You need to see Ragnvald go from the young upstart to the man with grown sons who has fewer and fewer choices until the end, when he has to make the only decision he can for his family. And it is a delight to see Svanhild find Solvi again, and for that to be the right thing for both of them.
This is a trilogy about kings that is focused on the impact those kings have on everyone else, and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of them here, but I think the wide-angle view is the right one; we need to see the mechanisms that created King Harald's reign, and how many moving pieces had to come together in exactly the right way for him to gain and keep power. This trilogy does that very effectively.
Grade: A
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