Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: Beowulf saga, Dragon Fantasy, Dragons, Historical Fantasy, Middle Ages, Physical Disabilities, Royalty Characters, Various Magic
My Rating:
Published on: 2nd February 2023
Pages: 416
Disability Representation: Hand Deformity, PTSD, Trauma
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / Waterstones / BookBeat Audio
Add to Goodreads

All her life, Fryda has longed to be a shield maiden – an honour reserved for Geatland's mightiest warriors. Though a terrible childhood injury has deemed her unfit for battle, she can secretly feel an uncontrollable force stirring within her...

And it's not long before her new-found powers are revealed. For when guests descend to celebrate her uncle King Beowulf's reign, she discovers treachery is afoot. When an enraged Fryda resolves to fight for her people, her powers seem only to grow. But she is not the only one to feel its effects – buried deep in a gilded lair, a dragon is drawn to Fryda's untamed power, and is slowly awakening from a long, cursed sleep...

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

Please note
As an Amazon Associate and member of other affiliate programmes I earn a small commission from items purchased using links featured in this post at no extra cost to you. Click here to learn more. Every purchase you make through Just Geeking By helps keep this blog running.

Shield Maiden started out as a brilliant fantasy saga, a retelling of the Beowulf saga from the perspective of a woman. Fryda is the beloved niece of the legendary hero; however, her father refuses to let her train as a warrior. As a child, she snuck out to prove her skills only for a terrible earthquake to end her dreams in more ways than one. Not only was she unable to complete her hunt, but she also ended up trapped in the earth and horrifically injured. When she was eventually found, the bones in her hand were broken so badly that she permanently lost the use of that hand and was disfigured for the rest of her life.

Her father saw her injury as further proof that Fryda was not meant to be a warrior, forbidding her from training as a warrior. But Fryda isn’t someone who is willing to give up so easily. She survived that horrific injury, and with the help of her friends, the blacksmith Bryce and a servant Hild, she trains in secret. She is determined to let nothing get in her way of becoming a shield maiden one day, and with Bryce’s help, she learns to adapt her injured hand so that she can fight with it.

For the first half of Shield Maiden, it was a fantastic read, with great disability representation, and Fryda is a fierce figure to be reckoned with. When her home comes under attack, she is right in the middle of the fight to save the day, and the battle scenes are well-written. Emmerichs has captured the essence of the legend of Beowulf perfectly at this point in the novel. Mixed alongside the treachery and battles was magic as a dragon slowly began to awaken from a sleeping spell, her fate entwined with Fryda’s.

And then I’m not quite sure what happened. The novel took a swift, sharp turn and became all about Fryda’s bigoted brother, Wiglaf, who seems determined to not just destroy Fryda’s happiness, but also run their home into the ground. There are more than a few holes in the story at this point, such as characters missing huge clues that point to the real perpetrator of a crime, yet somehow only Fryda notices them. The narrative also starts to get shaky when it jumps to Wiglaf’s perspective and he ‘sort of’ admits that he may have done something bad, but no, he’s ‘not going to think about that right now’. Umm, what? Even the battle scenes at the end of the book seemed to be of a lesser standard than those earlier, and the description of the dragon scenes left much to be desired.

I couldn’t shake the feeling throughout the book that Fryda was written out of context for the time period. She has very modern ideas about slavery and servants, and quite often she tried to come across as understanding when, quite frankly, she was clueless about what her friends’ lives were like. At one point, she tells her friend/lover, Theow, a slave, that “slavery isn’t what you are, it’s something awful that happened to you”. While she is perfectly correct, that is a very modern perspective and one that someone in her position, a young noblewoman, would not even know to consider.

What bothered me the most was the realisation that Fryda was written not as a disabled character who was inspirational due to her deeds, but because she was disabled and managed to do everything she accomplished. Her disability is constantly being pointed out, she is referred to as crippled by other characters, and attention is drawn to her disfigured hand at every opportunity so that the reader never forgets that it’s there. It’s done almost subtly, hidden in the narration as her friend’s loving gaze as they notice how Fryda always tucks that hand away from view. There are two problems with that. One, if her friends had no issue with her disability, as they continuously claim throughout the book, then they wouldn’t keep looking at her hand in every single scene with her, especially if they were so aware that Fryda was self-conscious about it. Secondly, it’s just a writing technique to draw the reader’s attention to Fryda’s disability, which, as I was saying, is the entire problem.

This became even more noticeable to me when reading the book directly after Shield Maiden, a book which also had a disabled protagonist and yet the author didn’t feel the need to keep reminding the reader that they were disabled. The only time the character’s disability came up was when it was a part of her life, such as removing her prosthetic limb to rest or bathe. It isn’t just enough to include a disabled character and call it representation. When such a huge effort is made to constantly remind the reader that a character is disabled, it begins to make me question the author’s intent for including a disabled character. I felt this even more when it was heavily suggested that a badly injured character, now disabled, deserved their just desserts. Becoming disabled is not a punishment, no matter what the person has done.

Thank you for reading my review for Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs. This is one book that started out so well, to the point that I recommended it to someone, and then went downhill rather dramatically for me. If you’re curious to know about the book I read afterwards, look out tomorrow for my review of Godkiller by Hannah Kaner!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

Support Just Geeking By

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did, please consider sharing it on social media using the nifty buttons at the end of this post <3

If you enjoyed this content, please consider supporting my blog. You can do this in multiple ways (click here to find out how!) or by donating via Ko-Fi to help me reach my current goal.