When How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You’re Meant to Be was available on Netgalley, I was immediately intrigued. A traditional Viking funeral normally involved the burning of a deceased individual and their most prized processions. However, in this case, the Viking funeral was about burning the past and accepting the future. It started when the author Kyle Scheele was getting ready to celebrate his 30th birthday and decided he wanted a Viking funeral theme. He built a cardboard ship that was sixteen feet long and set it a flame with items from his past. After a video of this unusual birthday celebration went viral, a plan was put into motion to do a second Viking funeral where anyone from around the world could submit their regrets and memories to be burned. This book is the reflection of that project.
Kyle Scheele is a motivational speaker by trade and you can definitely tell this as you are reading along. He is also a cardboard artist and loves creating outlandish projects to make people laugh. This second Viking ship was one of the most outlandish projects he had ever done. When he had asked people to submit notecards with their regrets, he really didn’t know what to expect. By the end, he had 21,000 index cards from around the world, with varying levels of regret waiting to be burned.
This book is part memoir and part inspiration. You are taken on the journey of the ship being constructed and the various failures that occur along the way. The author takes each failure as a lesson and uses it to further promote his idea of letting go of regrets. He breaks the experiences he goes through into themes and also uses these themes for the index cards he received. These themes included terms such as fears, identities, and beliefs. The themes are also used to reflect experiences from the authors life.
For the most part, I enjoyed How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You’re Meant to Be. It was a creative way to look at regrets and how to let them go and look more into the future. There is several moments of positive insight that will leave you reflecting on the way you view your own life and regrets. However, l did find it a bit repetitive at times, and slightly disorganized. It did come back to the original theme but, I think things could have been put in a more cohesive manner. The whole project is interesting to read though. I could never imagine trying to build my own 16 plus foot cardboard Viking ship!
Rating: 3 Stars
**I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.**
welcome to the zoo! 