The Testament of Loki

Joanne M. Harris

May 2018 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Allan Corduner

About this audiobook

In the sequel to The Gospel of Loki, Loki’s adventures continue when he finds a way out of the end of the world and plans to restart the power of the Norse gods.

The end of the world—also known as Ragnarok to the Norse gods—has occurred, and Loki has been trapped in a seemingly endless purgatory, in torture, until he finds a way to escape. It seems that he still exists in the minds of humanity and uses that as a way to our time.

Back in the ninth world (Earth), Loki finds himself sharing the mind of a teenage girl named Jumps, who is a bit of a mess. She’s also not happy about Loki sneaking his way into her mind since she was originally calling on Thor. Worse, her friends have also been co-opted by the gods: Odin, Jump’s one-eyed best friend in a wheelchair, and Freya, the pretty one. Thor escapes the netherworld as well and shares the mind of a dog, and he finds that it suits him.

Odin has a plan to bring back the Norse gods ascendancy, but Loki has his own ideas on how things can go—and nothing goes according to plan.

Ratings and reviews

A fun sequel, not nearly as good or as inspired as the first book. This one is a fine journey, but it's missing all the qualities of lore and myth that carried Gospel. It fudges its own logic often, doing things that make little sense for the sake of ... well, for the sake of there being a sequel. The audio narration is still very good, even with a wider breadth of characters.

perfect

About the author

Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks, and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magical realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology, and fantasy. In 2000, her 1999 novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is an honorary Fellow of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and in 2013 was awarded an MBE by the Queen. Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as “mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting, and quiet subversion.” She also spends too much time on Twitter, plays flute and bass guitar in a band first formed when she was sixteen, and works from a shed in her garden at her home in Yorkshire.