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WORK TITLE: Forest Child
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://heatherdaygilbert.com/
CITY:
STATE: WV
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/forest-child/oclc/971027388&referer=brief_results *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Not found in LOC
PERSONAL
Born in WV; married; husband’s name David; children: three.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Bob Jones University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Grace Award.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Heather Day Gilbert is a prolific novelist, and she explained her work on her Website, remarking: “I write Viking historicals because my family on my dad’s side would’ve had the name Thorvaldsen if they hadn’t changed it when they came to the USA, and through him, I’m allegedly related to Eirik the Red. I write West Virginia mystery/suspense because I enjoy bringing modern-day West Virginia to life for my readers.”
Gilbert’s Viking sagas include God’s Daughter and its sequel, Forest Child. Both novels expand on Viking myth and history, and the latter follows Freydis, daughter of Eirik the Red. Indeed, Forest Child is based on a tale about the expedition Freydis led to Vinland (an area believed to be near Newfoundland). Freydis leads two Icelandic traders on the trek, facing off with a number of enemies along the way. At times, Freydis manipulates her husband to ensure his assistance. Freydid also turns to her Christian brother, Leif, and his Christian best friend, Gudrid. As the story progresses, Freydid is converted to Christianity as well. After her conversion, she, Leif, and Gudrid set out to balance Viking laws with Christian concepts of forgiveness.
Reviews of Forest Child were largely positive, and a Publishers Weekly critic announced that “Gilbert crafts an engaging story depicting timeless human struggles with faith, love, loyalty, and leadership.” Werner Lind, writing in the online Girls with Guns, was also impressed, and he remarked that “Gilbert brings Freydis’ world vividly to life here, without employing info-dumps or cluttering the narrative with excessive details. (She includes a family tree for Freydis and a short list of other characters in the back, along with a short glossary of Viking terms used in the text.” Lind then went on to note that “even readers who haven’t read much about Vikings, I think, could guess the definitions of all these terms the same way.) This is a very taut, gripping read, with a lot of suspense in the first part even when you know the general outline of the history, and the plot continues to hold dangers and surprises up to the denouement and beyond.”
Another positive assessment appeared on the Gods Peculiar Treasure Rae Website, and a reviewer found that the novel “was rather gruesome to be honest. There were several parts that were hard to read. But also key to the story. . . . I loved it though. Absolutely. Reading it felt so good, and I can’t wait to read it again.” An online Beauty on the Backroads columnist noted that Forest Child is subtly Christian, and “themes of marriage, motherhood, and family ties give this story many layers, but for much of the plotline, I wasn’t sure where the Christian element would fit in. . . . But looking back on it now, I can see how the twists and turns in Freydis’s journey were leading her to a point where she could come to an important realization and make some much needed changes in her life. That’s where the Christian element fits in, and in my opinion, this kind of redemptive story is very much worth telling and worth reading.” Katherine Scott Jones, writing on her eponymous blog, simply stated that “readers with a Scandinavian heritage or interest in Viking lore will be especially drawn to the wealth of historical detail.” She then concluded: “In Freydis we find a fierce, flawed heroine. This is so much of what makes Forest Child an engrossing read, experiencing her journey of hard-won transformation. She was a woman willing to own her weakness and do the hard work of forgiveness—including forgiving herself.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of Forest Child.
ONLINE
Beauty on the Backroads, http://lisabartelt.com/(October 18, 2017), review of Forest Child.
Girls with Guns, http://girlswithguns.org/ (December 23, 2016), Werner Lind, review of Forest Child.
Gods Peculiar Treasure Rae, https://godspeculiartreasurerae.wordpress.com/(October 18, 2017), review of Forest Child.
Heather Day Gilbert Website, http://heatherdaygilbert.com (October 18, 2017).
Katherine Scott Jones Blog, http://katherinescottjones.com/ (October 18, 2017), Katherine Scott Jones, review of Forest Child.*
Heather Day Gilbert
Author
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ABOUT HEATHER
Welcome! Glad to have you visit my site.
Heather Day Gilbert, author
“Country Roads, take me home to the place I belong, West Virginia mountain momma, take me home, country roads.” ~lyrics from John Denver’s Country Roads
When I was growing up in southern West Virginia, you couldn’t have convinced me those lyrics would one day bring a longing pang to my heart. I was determined to move away from my rural, mountain-bound home state, so I could spread my wings and fly. Careers I considered in college were police officer, veterinarian, news reporter, and the list goes on and on.
I can’t tell you how many times my Grandma Wilcox said she wished I’d come back to live in West Virginia someday, and how many times I emphatically told her that wouldn’t happen (you’ll find my name under the definition of “Strong-Willed Child“–now better known as an ENTJ). Two years after my college graduation from Bob Jones University with an enigmatic major in “Humanities” (Liberal Arts–lots of writing, literature, and languages, along with fun electives like Judo and Abnormal Psychology), I married my college sweetheart, David, and I was ready to leave and cleave.
College Days at BJU
College Days
My right-hand man, constant supporter, and hubby I am blessed to be married to, David
David was from a dairy farm in Upstate New York, but he was in law school in New York City when we married. So I flew the nest and for a year, we lived in the Big Apple. It was there I realized I wasn’t born to be a big-city girl. I had grown up running around barefoot on big grassy yards. I liked climbing trees and memorizing the names of constellations. I came from a place where the people know YOUR people.
So after another year in Greenwich, Connecticut (still not a small town), we moved to live near my husband’s family in rural New York. Upstate New York is another planet from New York City!
The farm in Upstate New York
I loved it and in the six years we were there, our three children got to spend lots of time with their grandparents and great-grandparents and family. Upstate New York will always hold a huge chunk of my heart, because we have so many wonderful memories there and we continue to visit and make more. I have amazing in-laws I view as my second set of parents, and you’ll see the loving in-law theme popping up in nearly all of my books. In particular, that’s a part of my Murder in the Mountains mystery series.
But then we felt God was leading us away from our comfy home to a new adventure. Following His plan, we moved to Appomattox, Virginia, a lovely small town famous for being where the Civil War ended. God brought new family into our lives–church and homeschool family–and my husband was a law professor at Liberty University School of Law. After six years in Virginia, where I wrote my first two books, once again, we felt God pushing us to move.
We wanted to move back near family, and we were equally drawn to New York and West Virginia (where my family lives). In the meantime, God had started changing something in me, reminding me of the things I loved and missed about my home state. He showed me that maybe the mountains weren’t oppressive, but protective. Protective of family. Protective of memories. Protective of my love for the outdoors.
Let me tell you, I am sure my grandma and grandpa were laughing in heaven the day we got peace that our next move was to West Virginia. My grandma’s prayers probably laid the groundwork to pull me back. We now live in the house she chose so many years ago to raise her family in–the house my parents raised me in, and the house I’m now raising my children in. (By the way, I still prefer the term “reared”, but now it’s more acceptable to say “raised”, thus I use that term.) I am grateful to once again be a resident of wild and wonderful West Virginia.
I write Viking historicals because my family on my dad’s side would’ve had the name Thorvaldsen if they hadn’t changed it when they came to the USA, and through him, I’m allegedly related to Eirik the Red. I write West Virginia mystery/suspense because I enjoy bringing modern-day West Virginia to life for my readers.
I won’t go into my long and winding route to publication, but here’s a pic of my excitement over my first softcover, God’s Daughter.
Slightly blurry and crazy pic of me with my first-ever softcover in hand!
I’m so thrilled you’ve taken the time to stop in on my virtual front porch today–because front porches are the best place to chat! Speaking of which, here’s a pic of me and my AMAZING critique partner and talented author, Becky Doughty, talking on my porch. Be sure to check out her books here–I’ve read every one, and I heartily endorse them all. I’m also blessed that Becky is the narrator for three of my novels, and you can find all my audiobook links on my books page.
My gifted critique partner, Becky Doughty
I’m so pleased you stopped by to get to know a little more about me. One more thing–I’m represented by the amazing Julie Gwinn at The Seymour Agency.
I’m happy to answer your questions via email through the Contact Me page here.
-Heather
Biography
HEATHER DAY GILBERT, a Grace Award winner and bestselling author, writes novels that capture life in all its messy, bittersweet, hope-filled glory. Born and raised in the West Virginia mountains, generational story-telling runs in her blood. Heather writes Viking historicals and contemporary mystery/suspense. Publisher's Weekly gave Heather's Viking historical Forest Child a starred review, saying it is "an engaging story depicting timeless human struggles with faith, love, loyalty, and leadership."
Find Heather on Pinterest (heatherdgilbert), Instagram (@heatherdaygilbert), Twitter (@heatherdgilbert), and Facebook (heatherdaygilbert). You can find all her books at heatherdaygilbert.com.
9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Forest Child
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Forest Child
Heather Day Gilbert. WoodHaven, $13 trade
paper (290p) ISBN 978-0-9978279-0-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In the second and final installment of her Vikings of the New World Saga, Gilbert focuses on Freydis, daughter of
Eirik the Red, and the expedition she led with two Icelandic traders to Vinland (presumed to be an area near
Newfoundland). Based primarily on the Saga of the Greenlanders, Gilbert deftly fleshes out Freydis's story while
remaining true to the bones of the historical record. Freydis is treacherous and deceitful, certainly not afraid to goad
her devoted, albeit flawed, husband into putting her opponents to death. However, the fictionalized elements produce
a protagonist motivated by maternal protectiveness and a desire for righteous punishment--her brutality justified, and
her fearless determination respectable. Her brother Leif and best friend, Gudrid, are Christians; Freydis's conversion
comes later in this story. Ultimately, they must balance Viking laws and traditions against their adopted Christianity
and its monotheistic tenets of truth and forgiveness. A glossary is provided, but Gilbert skillfully limits her use of
Norse vocabulary to enhance the experience without bogging down the reader. Gilbert crafts an engaging story
depicting timeless human struggles with faith, love, loyalty, and leadership. (BookLife)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Forest Child." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339306&it=r&asid=48f12fdc413ca34c89c8fd57d57f62f0.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477339306
Forest Child, by Heather Day Gilbert
BY WERNER LIND DECEMBER 23, 2016 REVIEW
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Literary rating: starstarstarstarstar
Kick-butt quotient: action2action2action2action2
“A cleaved head never plots.”
“I swear to you, this death will be avenged. And not in the afterlife.” –Freydis Eiriksdotter
Most readers with any knowledge of early American history are aware that Viking sailors, faring south-westward from Greenland, discovered mainland North America around the year 1000 A.D. No lasting settlements were made, but archaeologists have excavated the temporary settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in present-day Newfoundland (probably the one referred to in the sagas as Straumsfjord). Our main contemporary historical sources for the Viking voyages to “Vinland” are two oral Icelandic sagas, committed to writing about 250 years after the events, which differ in details but basically present a common core of factual information. (The skalds who composed and transmitted the sagas weren’t composing fiction; they were recording history for an aliterate society, although they sometimes garbled or misunderstood details.)
Evangelical Christian author Heather Day Gilbert has taken these sagas, coupled with serious research into the Viking history and culture of that era, plausibly reconstructed a unified picture of the events they present, and brought it to life in a masterful historical series, The Vikings of the New World Saga, consisting of two novels, God’s Daughter and this sequel. Faithful to known facts, she uses her imagination to flesh them out, and to reconstruct believable personalities for the major and minor players in the events. (I’ve read modern re-tellings of the sagas, though not the sagas themselves, and could recognize persons and events in both books.) The first book focused on Gudrid, former pagan priestess (now a Christian) and healer; I wouldn’t really characterize her as an action heroine, though she does pack a blade and is psychologically prepared to fight if she has to. However, this one focuses on her half-sister-in-law by a previous marriage, Freydis, out-of-wedlock daughter of Eirik the Red, and she’s most definitely a butt-kicking lady.
Historical fiction about real-life people uses imagination to reconstruct the details history leaves out, and especially the inner personalities and motivations that history may record imperfectly or not at all. The Icelandic sagas don’t remember Freydis kindly: she’s depicted as a vicious, treacherous psychopath who becomes the New World’s first mass murderer. BUT…. 1.) No historians, medieval or modern, are wholly free from biases that shape their reaction to their material. Gender relations in early Scandinavian/Germanic and Celtic society, as reflected in these books, were comparatively more egalitarian and meritocratic than those of the “civilized” states of southern Europe. By the 13th century, though, when the oral sagas were being committed to writing, the more patriarchal and stratified attitudes of the latter were re-shaping thought and practice in the northern lands. To these historiographers, a woman who clearly didn’t fit their picture of proper gender roles may well have been seen as an obviously deviant villainess by definition, whose actions called for censorious treatment. 2.) Even some of the details recorded by the saga compilers themselves, if one reads between the lines, cast doubt on the supposedly innocent and pacific intentions of Freydis’ adversaries. And 3.), the two key conversations in the sagas that cast Freydis in the worst light, taken at face value, were totally private conversations that none of the original tellers of the material could actually have been privy to. They’re imaginative reconstructions, just as much as Gilbert’s dialogue is –and they’re reconstructions created by writers with an ideological agenda of their own.
Gilbert follows the factual account of events in the sagas faithfully (even including the two conversations I find suspect). But she fleshes out the picture with a more sympathetic vision, and a broader reconstruction of a plausible context, that gives us a very different picture of what (may have) actually happened on the Vineland coast a thousand years ago. The Freydis who emerges here isn’t an evil harridan, and isn’t psychotic. What she is is a tough-as-nails young woman who’s the product of a society that puts a premium on physical courage and fighting ability, who’s had to fight tooth and nail for anything she’s ever gotten, who didn’t feel loved as a child, never knew her birth mother, and doesn’t show love or give trust very easily, a female warrior (in her culture, that wasn’t a contradiction in terms) who killed men in combat while she was still in her teens, who doesn’t readily take orders from any man, woman, or deity, and who isn’t a total stranger to the effects of the special kind of dried mushrooms imbibed by Viking “berserkers” –which are as potent as modern-day “angel dust,” and just as dangerous. She’s also a smart, competent woman (it says something that she’s the expedition leader here, not her husband) with principles as strong as steel, and deep reserves of love and loyalty. And like all of us, she’s a woman on a spiritual journey … which might not end where it began. In real life, the Vikings of succeeding generations never forgot her. Modern readers probably won’t, either.
Gilbert brings Freydis’ world vividly to life here, without employing info-dumps or cluttering the narrative with excessive details. (She includes a family tree for Freydis and a short list of other characters in the back, along with a short glossary of Viking terms used in the text; but I personally didn’t need the former, and with my Scandinavian background, the latter only included a couple of words I didn’t know –and I’d roughly deduced the meanings of those from the context already. Even readers who haven’t read much about Vikings, I think, could guess the definitions of all these terms the same way.) This is a very taut, gripping read, with a lot of suspense in the first part even when you know the general outline of the history, and the plot continues to hold dangers and surprises up to the denouement and beyond. It’s written in first-person, present-tense, which puts us inside Freydis’ head and bonds us to her quickly. As in the first book, the characterizations are believable and vivid. All told, this is historical fiction at its finest! I give it my highest recommendation, and I’m looking forward to reading more of Gilbert’s work.
I would strongly advise reading both books in order; they have many of the same characters, and it will help you as a reader to come to this book with the better and deeper understanding of the relationships, personalities and general situation that reading the first book will give you. Action heroine fans usually like other kinds of strong heroines as well, and Gudrid easily fits into that sorority.
Full disclosure: I was gifted with a free copy of this work by the author, just because she knew I wanted to read it. I wasn’t asked to give a favorable review (or, really, any review at all) –that had to be earned, and it was earned in abundance.
Author: Heather Day Gilbert
Publisher: WoodHaven Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.