Tryst with Trolls: The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer

If your idea of trolls is a cute little kewpie doll with bad hair, Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trollswill expand your concept of trolldom considerably.

Farmer's saga is not so much a blend of realistic adventure and fantasy quest as it is a chance to see the world as it would have likely been seen by a twelve-year-old Saxon farm lad in 793 A.D. In that time early Christianity and bits and pieces of Norse and Celtic cosmology were commingled in the minds of most, and Jack and his sister Lucy are no exceptions.

Jack, a boy of indifferent abilities, has recently been taken as apprentice by an elderly bard and has barely mastered Magic 101, fire-starting, fog-calling, and a few healing brews, when he and his five-year-old sister are seized as thralls in a raid by giant Viking Olaf One-Brow and his would-be berserking shield-maiden Thorgil. Pillaging and slaughtering as they go, Olaf, Thorgil, and their crew make their way back to their home fiord, where Jack, designated Olaf's skald (minstrel), is required to sing a hero song of Olaf's brave deeds before King Ivar the Boneless and his cruel shape-shifting half-troll wife Queen Frith.

When Jack's immature magic goes awry and causes Frith to lose her luxuriant locks and her human beauty, Lucy is seized and held for sacrifice in Freya's Fen unless Jack can find and drink from Mimar's Well in Jotunheim, the Land of the Trolls, and gain the wisdom and wizardry necessary to restore Frith's looks. With the hulking Olaf and ever-raging Thorgil joining the quest, Jack, his crow Bold Heart, and a few other raiders sail and trek toward the hall of the Mountain Queen, troll mother Glamdis.

When Olaf suddenly goes on to Valhalla after an unfortunate battle with a troll-bear, Jack and Thorgil must go it alone, battling dragons and giant spiders and charming the troll queen into granting safe passage to the waters of the enchanted well. Both Jack and Thorgil drink of the well and are changed. Thorgil loses her consuming anger and urge to die as a Valkyrie, and Jack gains a full understanding of the life force that fills all living things and their place in the structure of Yggdrassil, the Tree of Life. Jack's magical powers increase, he fulfils his promise to Frith with a most satisfying twist, and Jack and Lucy are returned to their village and parents in England, with a promise from Thorgil and the raiders that they will never again pillage his village.

Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls is a thumping-good adventure, a sweeping saga with a huge cast of totally weird but somehow likable characters, and a brief course in northern European mythology to boot. Despite its heft, it is a book which reads like a page-turner, filled with humor and love of life in all its strange manifestations, a book which will appeal to anyone old enough to pick it up and read it.

Update: The sequel to The Sea of Trolls, titled The Land of the Silver Apples, has recently been published. The final book in the trilogy, The Islands of the Blessed, is scheduled for release in 2009.