The Sea of Trolls is the beginning of a trilogy published in the last few years. The first being this book stands alone as a superb story. One that is fantastical, compelling and funny that involves Viking north-men and an Anglo-Saxon family along with a whole host of mythical beings: giant owls, troll-cats, and dragons. The Sea of Trolls is classified as Young-Adult Fiction and blends the elements of an epic poem and Norse history.
Poor Jack. He’s 11, a farmer’s son living in a village on the northeast coast of Britain in A.D. 793. He is vexed by family issues: while his mother is loving and wise, his surly, demanding father saves all his paternal affection for Lucy, Jack’s sweet 5-year-old sister. Hard-working, unappreciated Jack has little to look forward to but a tedious life of plowing, tending sheep, collecting driftwood, clutching his cloak against the wintry gusts and grating his teeth on gritty loaves of dense, crusty bread.
Other Anglo-Saxon children would presumably see no problem with that, but Jack is sensitive, and when ”The Sea of Trolls” begins, on a cold February morning before dawn, in lambing season, we find him feeling a little sorry for himself.
But Jack is also the hero of a Nancy Farmer book, which means that things are not going to stay this bad for long. They are about to get much, much worse.
Those who know British history recognize 793 as a 9/11 of the early Christian world — the year vikings ransacked Holy Island, or Lindisfarne, slaughtering peaceable monks and beginning a long era of seagoing terror in the British Isles.
~ The New York Times
Although this book may be intended for a younger audience, its depth is still able to capture people’s imagination regardless of their reading level. The Sea of Trolls brings into question honor, the after-life, the divine and perception of reality itself. Nancy Farmer makes the life that surrounds water, the ocean back in time tangible through devastating storms that attack coastal villages to calm waves subsiding past longboats.
Nancy Farmer brilliantly re-engineers the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill to a mystical coming-of-age expedition from 4 verses to over four-hundred pages.
http://www.nancyfarmerwebsite.com/trolls-trilogy.html
