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Trolls
Curious and imaginative eight-year-old Emily is obsessed with fairy tales and magic. On one of Emily’s excursions into the wilds of the unmanicured grounds behind her home, she discovers a crumbling bridge and attempts to cross the structure, only to have it collapse beneath her and send her tumbling into the realm of the Trolls.
In a world of lost children, friendly Trolls, a dreadful dot, pesky pirate Piskies, and an evil witch who seeks to drain magic from the world, Emily ultimately must find the strength to trust herself, and follow the path that will lead her to where she truly belongs.
In a world of lost children, friendly Trolls, a dreadful dot, pesky pirate Piskies, and an evil witch who seeks to drain magic from the world, Emily ultimately must find the strength to trust herself, and follow the path that will lead her to where she truly belongs.
169 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
256 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 15, 2018
In the beginning I was a little lost, but after a few more pages all I wanted to do was read more. I couldn't stop reading. I didn't know what would happen to the characters next. It was always a surprise. The end was well thought out and concluded the book very well. I sometimes wish that really good books that don't have sequels really should, this is one of those books.
May 12, 2014
This book was a really cute book. I love the story and how it was written. I was caught into the book, because it was a mix of two of my favorite child stories. I also really like the author. She is a wonderful person and I had so much fun talking to her when I met her at a convention.
May 14, 2025
My Arizona author last month was J. J. M. Czep, and I'm back with another of hers because I'd read 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' before, albeit so long ago that it predates my debut at the Nameless Zine in June 2014, but I hadn't read 'Trolls'. It looks like this one started out with AZ Publishing Services as well, but my copy is a couple of years newer and published by Brick Cave Media. Either way, it has a gorgeous cover, courtesy of Sarah Price, who's done a lot of wonderful work in a similar style.
Talking of similar styles, though, the writing isn't. 'Trolls' is a very different novel to 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy', both in tone and intended audience. I presume this counts as YA and certainly feels like it was always aimed at a young audience. The lead character is only eight-years-old and the fairytale logic of the story unfolds with childlike innocence. However, there's serious depth to the story and there's a real message here, one that children will hopefully hear but which adults can't miss.
Emily is a human child who lives in a human world, but we might not realise that from the opening chapter. She's a reader and she clearly lets the magic of what she reads bleed over into the world she lives in. She's reading about trolls when this book starts, so she naturally sees her aunt, there to summon her to her lessons, as a Troll, just as she sees her mother as the Princess of the Jungle, the solarium in which she studies. She's a lively soul, who doesn't merely slide down the banisters, she dismounts with a somersault and bows to an imaginary audience. I liked her immediately.
Just as we're trying to imagine the reality behind what Emily sees at home, we leave it with her, a tumble through the hole in a bridge in the manor's grounds taking her not only into a river but to the world below it. While she had already imagined trolls guarding this bridge, she soon learns to her shock that she's the troll who should have been guarding it, if only she hadn't been lost eight years earlier. In this upside-down world with the river floating above them rather than below, the trolls are lost kids rather than huge monsters with clubs. Clearly Alice has fallen into Neverland.
Of course, she wants to go home, in the sense of where she's grown up, but she finds that she has to contend with the fact that she might actually be home, in the sense of where she's supposed to be and where she should have been all along. What follows is episodic, so much more akin to 'Alice in Wonderland' than 'Peter Pan', but that's no bad thing. The trick to being episodic in a story like this is to reserve a little of the magic of it for each location and each character and keep them all quirky but different. The reason this book works is because Czep manages that without appearing to even try.
'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' felt crafted, like she knew her characters in advance from real people in her life, wrote fictional back stories for them each, then pieced them together into a larger new story. 'Trolls' feels entirely organic, like it simply flowed out of her. I'm sure she didn't sit down one day, started typing and an indeterminate amount of time later she had what I'm reading but it feels as if she did exactly that in a single glorious burst of imagination. Hey, it's been done before! Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first draught of 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in three days after dreaming it. Why not Jenn Czep too?
It's telling that Emily doesn't accept her new world under the river with the other lost children, so she dives upwards to the surface and returns to the manor where she lives, discovering that what she thinks took hours encompassed a mere twenty minutes away. It's easy to imagine that she just fell into the river, got out and that was that. But hey, what if, as they say. And when the imaginary world feels more enticing than the real one, then why not dive back into your imagination? That's a pretty dark Lovecraftian mindset, where going insane is sometimes a happy ending, but Czep is very keen to keep darkness out of this book, whatever subtext adults will read into it.
And so, having gone back to her old home above the water, Emily decides to go back to her new one under it, where she's seen not as Emily Marie but Tierannie, a long-lost troll, and we can get down to the real story at hand. Now the other trolls introduce themselves with names like Burn, Pillage and Plunder and take her through their Jungle to the Queen's Hall. This jungle isn't a solarium but a hallucination that needs imagination to traverse. It's the first sign that Dorothy isn't in Kansas anymore, Toto, and suddenly there's another comparison that plays out well. As I'm finding, only two books into the 'Oz' series, Baum embraced nonsense and surrealism as much as Lewis Carroll, and Czep proudly walks in their footsteps.
Like 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', 'Trolls' ends up framed as a quest. The Queen of the Trolls, who Emily is about to meet, suddenly goes missing and it falls to her to save her, because she's the only one headstrong enough to volunteer. However, her newfound friends promptly join her on such an important mission because every hero needs her sidekicks. It seems that a witch named Arakne is in search of the Queen's keys to the surface world and so kidnaps her to get them. Now Tierannie, as which Emily is increasingly identified, and her friends must travel to the witch's castle to rescue the Queen. And I'll shut up now because this is a journey you'll want to experience yourself.
I've always had a blast with this sort of pure entertainment for children. There are ways by which we can extrapolate meaning and depth as adult readers in ways we'd likely never have noticed as children, and that adds some agreeable layers to the storytelling, but this can be read gloriously straight, how kids are likely to see it. So Emily may well be delusional, escaping trauma by leaping into a world of imagination where she can feel welcomed and valued and important, but perhaps, just perhaps, she's just found her way home and now she can live up to her truest potential. That every step of the way is glorious fun is a bonus.
Czep has written other books, her other novel being 'Cloud to Cloud', what appears to be a hybrid of science fiction, fantasy and maybe technothriller in collaboration with Bob Frank, which means that this is her only novel for children and that boggles my mind. I enjoyed 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' and would love to read its promised sequel, but it feels like she had to work to bring it into being. This feels like it poured out of her like this was her function in life and, if that's the case, then the taps should stay open and more stories like this should flood out. I hope to read another one someday.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in November 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Nana-...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
Talking of similar styles, though, the writing isn't. 'Trolls' is a very different novel to 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy', both in tone and intended audience. I presume this counts as YA and certainly feels like it was always aimed at a young audience. The lead character is only eight-years-old and the fairytale logic of the story unfolds with childlike innocence. However, there's serious depth to the story and there's a real message here, one that children will hopefully hear but which adults can't miss.
Emily is a human child who lives in a human world, but we might not realise that from the opening chapter. She's a reader and she clearly lets the magic of what she reads bleed over into the world she lives in. She's reading about trolls when this book starts, so she naturally sees her aunt, there to summon her to her lessons, as a Troll, just as she sees her mother as the Princess of the Jungle, the solarium in which she studies. She's a lively soul, who doesn't merely slide down the banisters, she dismounts with a somersault and bows to an imaginary audience. I liked her immediately.
Just as we're trying to imagine the reality behind what Emily sees at home, we leave it with her, a tumble through the hole in a bridge in the manor's grounds taking her not only into a river but to the world below it. While she had already imagined trolls guarding this bridge, she soon learns to her shock that she's the troll who should have been guarding it, if only she hadn't been lost eight years earlier. In this upside-down world with the river floating above them rather than below, the trolls are lost kids rather than huge monsters with clubs. Clearly Alice has fallen into Neverland.
Of course, she wants to go home, in the sense of where she's grown up, but she finds that she has to contend with the fact that she might actually be home, in the sense of where she's supposed to be and where she should have been all along. What follows is episodic, so much more akin to 'Alice in Wonderland' than 'Peter Pan', but that's no bad thing. The trick to being episodic in a story like this is to reserve a little of the magic of it for each location and each character and keep them all quirky but different. The reason this book works is because Czep manages that without appearing to even try.
'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' felt crafted, like she knew her characters in advance from real people in her life, wrote fictional back stories for them each, then pieced them together into a larger new story. 'Trolls' feels entirely organic, like it simply flowed out of her. I'm sure she didn't sit down one day, started typing and an indeterminate amount of time later she had what I'm reading but it feels as if she did exactly that in a single glorious burst of imagination. Hey, it's been done before! Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first draught of 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in three days after dreaming it. Why not Jenn Czep too?
It's telling that Emily doesn't accept her new world under the river with the other lost children, so she dives upwards to the surface and returns to the manor where she lives, discovering that what she thinks took hours encompassed a mere twenty minutes away. It's easy to imagine that she just fell into the river, got out and that was that. But hey, what if, as they say. And when the imaginary world feels more enticing than the real one, then why not dive back into your imagination? That's a pretty dark Lovecraftian mindset, where going insane is sometimes a happy ending, but Czep is very keen to keep darkness out of this book, whatever subtext adults will read into it.
And so, having gone back to her old home above the water, Emily decides to go back to her new one under it, where she's seen not as Emily Marie but Tierannie, a long-lost troll, and we can get down to the real story at hand. Now the other trolls introduce themselves with names like Burn, Pillage and Plunder and take her through their Jungle to the Queen's Hall. This jungle isn't a solarium but a hallucination that needs imagination to traverse. It's the first sign that Dorothy isn't in Kansas anymore, Toto, and suddenly there's another comparison that plays out well. As I'm finding, only two books into the 'Oz' series, Baum embraced nonsense and surrealism as much as Lewis Carroll, and Czep proudly walks in their footsteps.
Like 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', 'Trolls' ends up framed as a quest. The Queen of the Trolls, who Emily is about to meet, suddenly goes missing and it falls to her to save her, because she's the only one headstrong enough to volunteer. However, her newfound friends promptly join her on such an important mission because every hero needs her sidekicks. It seems that a witch named Arakne is in search of the Queen's keys to the surface world and so kidnaps her to get them. Now Tierannie, as which Emily is increasingly identified, and her friends must travel to the witch's castle to rescue the Queen. And I'll shut up now because this is a journey you'll want to experience yourself.
I've always had a blast with this sort of pure entertainment for children. There are ways by which we can extrapolate meaning and depth as adult readers in ways we'd likely never have noticed as children, and that adds some agreeable layers to the storytelling, but this can be read gloriously straight, how kids are likely to see it. So Emily may well be delusional, escaping trauma by leaping into a world of imagination where she can feel welcomed and valued and important, but perhaps, just perhaps, she's just found her way home and now she can live up to her truest potential. That every step of the way is glorious fun is a bonus.
Czep has written other books, her other novel being 'Cloud to Cloud', what appears to be a hybrid of science fiction, fantasy and maybe technothriller in collaboration with Bob Frank, which means that this is her only novel for children and that boggles my mind. I enjoyed 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' and would love to read its promised sequel, but it feels like she had to work to bring it into being. This feels like it poured out of her like this was her function in life and, if that's the case, then the taps should stay open and more stories like this should flood out. I hope to read another one someday.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in November 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Nana-...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
June 8, 2013
A young people book that resonates on so many planes it bears multiple readings. A few typos and grammatical choices reveal its homespun roots and add to its charm. Owning a signed copy of this book is like owning the error filled first edition of Alice or Dorothy's first adventure. The rose garden is well placed as under the magic and questing is themes about mental illness, remembering, and well if you read this, I do promise you a rose garden.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews