I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
Full confession: I didn’t know this was written by THAT Willow Smith until after I finished it and looked it up again on Goodreads.
Black Shield Maiden is a historical fantasy in which the main character Yafeu, a Ghanian young woman, is caught by a slaver raid on her village and taken across the desert to a market. Instead of being sold, she’s rescued by a group of Viking warriors led by a fierce shieldmaiden, and taken to somewhere in the Viking lands. She begins as a thrall (the slave caste in Viking age Norse society), but soon becomes the personal servant of the princess, Freydis. Yafeu’s life takes a surprising series of turns resulting in a level of leadership she never expected.
Ok, I’m late to this party, and I know there’s a ton of contraversy. I don’t know the actual history of who helped and who hindered during the slave trade, but I do know that no culture is without a hell of a lot of skeletons in their respective closets. The book is full of cringey moments depicting all the cultures involved, including Norse, as far as I could tell. Yafeu’s judgements of her own people, her captors, her rescuers, and ultimately her new captors was often condescending. Freydis even comments on it at one point. Ultimately I didn’t find that to be as much of an issue as her character’s motivation and development itself, which is what I look for in a novel.
I thought Yafeu’s Mary Sue qualities were so distracting it took me a long time to finish this book. She’s supposed to be a young woman when she’s captured, but somehow she’s an expert in everything she does when she becomes a thrall in the Viking city, including healing, hunting, tracking, cooking, making weapons, and fighting? All these skills she learned from her father, who’d gone away years before with other Norsemen, never to return? While the twists and turns of the plot were well done, I thought the character needed actually fail and learn more than she did.
I think Black Shield Maiden is a fantastic premise, but I wanted something more. A little less perfection, a few more foibles and failures would make Yafeu more interesting and less like a dispassionate observer in her own story. That said, I do want to know what happens next, so from that perspective the story was successful. The book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger that bodes well for a sequel, and I sincerely hope one is coming to wrap up the loose threads.
No Pithy Phrase 