100 Books Like The Littlest Viking

When Mia’s new brother arrives, she finds herself without a place of her own – Brandon’s stuff is everywhere! She moves from place to place around the house, but nowhere feels quite right. In the end, Mia comes to find that having her own space doesn’t have to mean moving away from Brandon. This book beautifully opens the door to conversations around adjusting to a new sibling, sharing, and personal space. I also love that it incorporates adoption without making that the focus point of the story.

When King Baby arrives, a young princess is forced to share her kingdom. The princess protests her new brother and his attention-demanding ways. She plots to break the spell King Baby holds over the rest of the kingdom until she discovers that perhaps there are benefits to co-ruling after all. Filled with humor, this voice-y princess is sure to be a hit with young rulers everywhere.

I thought the introduction of a boy named Elmore Green and how life used to be helped to set the stage for the day everything changed when his little brother was born.

I loved that it goes through some of the struggles that Elmore goes through, like having to share his toys and space, which is something that every older sibling will need to go through. 

Boss Baby is used to being in charge but when his baby sister arrives, it is clear that there is a new CEO in town, and he is not happy about the perks she is getting that he never got. Boss baby feels replaced and ignored until an unexpected move from the new CEO shows that perhaps there is room for two CEOs after all. With a loud fun voice and adorable artwork, this is a hilarious and heart-squeezing read.

This fun read, full of humor and adventure, is a mash-up of Viking lore and the story of Beowulf in a contemporary setting. Abby, grieving over the death of her mother, is also at a new school—not to mention training as the last of the Aesir warriors destined to hunt and kill Grendels. When a Grendel starts hunting her instead, Abby has a lot to unravel and conquer, fast. 

I adore quirky stories that play with Western myths (heck, I wrote one), and this book has that in spades. For kids that love Norse mythology, this will provide smiles, snorts, and a perfect dose of white-knuckled page-turning. We grow with Abby as she builds new friendships and conquers old fears. She’s a great contemporary heroine with absolutely relatable problems.

I've read Anglo-Saxon history. I've read Viking Age history. But this is the first book I've read that combined them together to make a clear picture of the forces that drove these two people against each other.

This book covers the alliances, battles, and the people who were constantly shifting from one person's orbit to another. Although its main focus was England, the book also provides a view of the conflicts going on in Norway and Denmark, to give a holistic view of Northern Europe and what happened when huge armies of Danes and Norwegians came to England, leaving a power vacuum behind them in the north.

Judith Jesch is Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and whilst she is primarily a specialist in early medieval literature she has a rare inter-disciplinary command of historical and archaeological sources. In this sweeping review of the Viking World she provides an authoritative overview of the Scandinavians at home and their migrations overseas, with a particular focus on gender and the family, and cults, beliefs and myths. By using the concept of diaspora, she focuses on the ways in which migrants maintained their sense of cultural identity with the Scandinavian homelands and other areas of Scandinavian migration. The interconnectedness of the Viking world is at the heart of this book, and language is seen as key to the maintenance of the Viking diaspora, reinforced by texts and material culture.

Sadly this book is now out of print, but hopefully, Snorri will create an updated and expanded edition in the near future. This book is a look at the Sagas of Icelanders, and particularly the combat in the sagas, from the perspective of a slaughterhouse worker, a perspective that only a butcher would have. In researching Vikings and their combat, one must intently look for experts who often are far outside one’s own field of expertise. Snorri’s book shows the benefits of an approach from a different perspective.

‘Viking’ really refers more to an activity than an ethnicity, and has developed an unhelpful amount of baggage in modern times. This book, however, is about vikings red in tooth and claw who fought, raided, and conquered across Britain, but did so as conscious and coherent historical figures rather than an aggressive force of nature. Through delicate source-work that traverses several linguistic and cultural divides, Downham traces the activities of a powerful Scandinavian dynasty that played a formative role in the history of Britain and Ireland across the ninth and tenth centuries.

This was one of the first books I read when I decided to write about Vikings and I found it a treasure trove filled with information about the daily lives of the Scandinavians, away from raids and the shield walls.

It told me everything I needed to know about what Vikings wore, what they ate and how they cooked their meals. I learnt about the hierarchy of the ruling classes and how they traded with the nations of the Middle East. It is filled with information about their religion, how they felt about life and death, and much more.