D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls

Best for Ages 7-10. Beautifully illustrated.

A gorgeous book, beautifully written and illustrated, witty and instructive. Only a troll would not like it.

I you and the kid(s) are tired of sickly uber-politically correct and banal children's stories, then go for this book. It's big and has excellent ilustrations that will get you talking about each page. This is especially good for our family because we speak another language. It's more informative than story-based, which is kind of novel for a childrens' book. Even better than this is 'The Terrible Troll Bird' by the same authors.

As someone who is trying to cultivate a love of literature AND a lengthy attention span in my homeschooled children, I *did* purchase this for my pre-schooler and he sat happily through the entire book (3 evenings worth of reading for us). The d'Aulaire illustrations were, as always, engaging, soft, and encouraging to the child's imagination. Detailed without taking over the telling of the tales. Basically, it covered all of my criteria to be purchased: well written and if it has illustrations they need to be worthy of the story and worth looking at. The down side to this book is that it is in some ways a long treatise on trolls that happens to include some stories as examples. This means that your child ends the book having been exposed to a lot of the folk beliefs of Scandinavian trolls, with a limited number of stories, and that it doesn't offer simple cut-off points for bedtime reading. On the other hand, it means it is a book worth revisiting as a child grows older; in our case so our children will be versed in the folklore and belief of their ancestors. A simpler bedtime book with lovely woodblock illustrations would be Lise Lunge-Larsen's "The Troll with No Heart in His Body." It is a collection of the stories with very brief intros that can be included or omitted according to the moment (at bedtime with my pre-schooler I tend to leave them out; when reading during the day I am more likely to include them). I'm not really suggesting one book over the other. In a search for either cultural literacy or multiculturalism, both have their place and are both well told, well illustrated and will add to your child's imaginative landscape.

Love reading these books to my daughter.