Title: The Sea of Trolls
Author: Nancy Farmer
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Series: The Sea of Trolls Trilogy, #1
Paperback: 459 pages
My Rating: ♣ ♣ ♣ (3.5)
Recommended Season of Reading: Fall
Jack was eleven when the berserkers loomed out of the fog and nabbed him. “It seems that things are stirring across the water,” the Bard had warned. “Ships are being built, swords are being forged.”
“Is that bad?” Jack had asked, for his Saxon village had never before seen berserkers.
“Of course. People don’t make ships and swords unless they intend to use them.”
The year is A.D. 793. In the next months, Jack and his little sister, Lucy, are enslaved by Olaf One-Brow and his fierce young shipmate, Thorgil. With a crow named Bold Heart for mysterious company, they are swept up into an adventure-quest in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings. Other threats include a willful mother dragon, a giant spider, and a troll-bear with a surprising personality — to say nothing of Ivar the Boneless and his wife, Queen Frith, a shape-shifting half-troll, and several eight-foot-tall, orange-haired, full-time trolls.
This book was truly remarkable. It regrouped Norse mythology and Celtic beliefs into a pleasing read.
Nancy Farmer created characters that were quite different from each other *cough, The Throne of Glass Series, cough*. They were very interesting characters, all with a humorist side to them, no matter how gruesome they can get. They were so unique in their own ways and I was immediately attached to them. So much that I didn’t even need to look into the “Cast of Characters”, and that is one thing, because I always have an awful time remembering names. The characters have such rich personalities and character traits that you can really picture them in your mind. In The Sea of Trolls, no character is perfect, and you can see every side of them. I love how the trolls are represented. They are definitely not the big brown boulders that are afraid of sunlight. Instead, they are represented as massively fat, green creatures with bright orange hair. They are quite sympathetic and can get very funny! I love how they say that the more belly fat you have, the prettier you are.
Nancy Farmer also created a very believable world. The story takes place on our own planet, in the past, and yet the Norse mythology represented in this book is so richly there that it seems like it’s a whole different world. Yggdrasil, Mimir’s well, troll, bards, and more are so well included in our world that you can almost look back into our history and wonder if it all really existed.
This makes me think of this joke someone once said. A person asked asked his friend, “would you like to live in the past?”, and the boy answered: “Yes! Then I would have less history to learn at school!”
Anyway, The Sea of Trolls is an overall fantastic book that I would recommend to most ages above 9. Anybody who enjoys reading about Norse mythology and seeks adventure will love this book!
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