I really enjoyed this, though I did feel as if the historical framework of the thin child, and how she used Norse myth to cope with living through WW2 and the absence of her father to be, well, thin. Extraordinarily so. It doesn't give a great deal of weight to the rest of it, and I'm of two minds as to whether it needs to be there at all. The myth itself is well told, but what really stands out for me, and what's bumping this up to four stars rather than three, is the naturalist setting. The thin child wanders through the English countryside, and it's flowers and plants all the way. The world serpent slithers along the ocean bed and it's corals and otters and crown-of-thorns starfish... every other page, it seems, is a welter of organism and detail. This isn't using historical events to write about myth, this is using myth to write about nature, and that nature writing was what appealed the most.