Spenser Lincoln’s debut novel, Yaga in Yggdrasil City, is an eclectic mix of fantasy, mythology, urban fiction, bildungsroman, romance, and adventure. I have never read a book like this. EM Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel: “Expansion. That is the idea to which the novelist must cling. Not completion. Not rounding, but opening.” Spenser Lincoln has embodied that idea in his novel, showing us a complex world of which we have only glimpses. Reading this novel is like visiting a foreign country where we left with limited knowledge of the people, but have fallen in love with it and want to keep exploring it again and again.
The novel begins with Yaga and her two high school classmates, George and Audhild, defeating a lich that threatens their world. The prologue details this pivotal scene around which everything that follows is built.
Then, in Chapter 1, we fast-forward four years to Yaga being in college with her younger girlfriend, Simone. We follow Yaga’s daily activities, from flying to school in the fall and shoveling sidewalks for money in the winter, to learning how to use his first cell phone and helping his girlfriend make potions. Yes, they attend a college that teaches magic, but this book is not a Harry Potter story. Instead, it is a story of heartbreak as Yaga continually struggles with his past and who he wants to be in his present.
The battle with the lich created difficulties for George and Audhild while Yaga skyrocketed to momentary celebrity status. Even now, when people have largely forgotten the lich’s attack, we are told that Yaga “seemed like she could do no wrong. She had radiated a majesty that burned down to the subatomic level and influenced generations.” But that majesty and the power that it has achieved also have negative effects on Yaga. They have made him selfish, which has created a distance between him and many of his friends. It has even caused his mother and his sister to abandon him.
Yaga in Yggdrasil City is not the story of a superhero. Thor may feel at home living in Yggdrasil, the great world tree from Norse mythology upon which the city of the novel is built, but he has no place in this novel. This novel is an introspective look at the costs of heroism.
It is also a masterful creation of a fictional world. Yggdrasil is its own planet, but it seems like a familiar but alternate reality to the reader. There are many humans in Yggdrasil, but there are also elves, sphinxes, vampires, and many other creatures. In truth, we only get small glimpses of this complicated society and how it works, and the reader is left wanting more. Numerous volumes would not quench one’s thirst to learn the details of this complex and intriguing world. These are just the opening two paragraphs of Chapter 1 that introduce us to this unique place:
“Outside of proper time and space, there was an infinite, flat plain. Its base was the protomaterial before the first atom. Scattered across its surface were ruins and transplants of older realities. The transplanted peoples of pre-existing worlds congregated and gave forms the only true landmark, an offshoot of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
“Even as a sapling, the tree had risen and spurned every natural growth and deadly construct that had ever been. Before the first human, or at least a bipedal person, had been diverted into this remnant of existence, the sapling it was a mountain. Over eons of relative time, the tree grew, and people built a city from it and from the inside out. In the areas beyond the shade, they planted their crops and flags and built fences to protect both .Under the leaves, the sewage was the first, and the smoke burping industry took what little was left of solid ground.From the roots of the inner city to the high branches of the upper city, people lived and made a living by providing services to everyone else. Today, Yaga provided one of these city services as a pharmacy clerk while watching the first snow fall outside the window.”
A hero who now works as a pharmacy clerk; that kind of contrast will set the reader up for a journey full of twists and turns. I guarantee that every page of Yaga in Yggdrasil City will have you reacting in awe to the intricacies of this strange and magical world, all the result of Spenser Lincoln’s imagination.
