The Witch's Heart

Few mythological retellings dare to begin at the moment of erasure — when a figure has already been unmade by the powerful and cast to the margins of history. Genevieve Gornichec structures her debut around exactly that void, filling it not with heroics but with something quieter and more devastating: a woman building a life from the wreckage of her own legend. Angrboda exists in the cracks of Norse mythology, and Gornichec treats that obscurity as the richest possible canvas. The pacing is deliberate, almost elegiac, unfolding across centuries with the unhurried weight of oral tradition. Readers expecting sword-swinging adventure will find instead a deeply interior novel about grief, motherhood, and the peculiar loneliness of loving someone as chaotic and unknowable as Loki. The tenderness here is not softness — it accumulates into something genuinely heartbreaking by the final chapters. Anyone drawn to feminist mythology, Scandinavian folklore, or books that refuse to let forgotten women stay forgotten will find this an essential read. It earns its ending precisely because it never rushes toward it.