Title Brian Froud's Trolls Series --- Author Brian & Wendy Froud Illustrator Brian Froud Publisher Abrams - 2012 First Printing Abrams - 2012 Category Art Warnings None Main Characters Tam Main Elements Trolls

New York Times bestselling author!
Hugo Award- and Locus Award–Winning Author!
From the artist behind The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth

Not since Brian Froud’s conceptual design work with Jim Henson on the classic films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth has he created a faerie world with such imagination, dimension, depth, and detail.

Trolls features new and classic work by both Brian and Wendy woven together with artifacts and symbols of the natural world to create a fascinating revelation about the world of trolls. The book explores trolls and troll culture, revealing their philosophies, their home life, and their world attitudes through their tales, mythology, and archaeology.

Froud writes in his introduction, “Who sleeps under the silent hill and what huddles in the dank darkness under the bridge? In short, what sort of invisible spirits inhabit our visible world and what do they look like? My paintings of trolls answer some of these questions. . . . The last conversation Jim Henson and I had before his death was about collaborating on another film. It was to be about trolls. This book is, in essence, the film we never got to make.”

The artwork here features Froud’s sketches and full-color paintings of trolls in their native habitats. It also seamlessly blends in Wendy Froud’s astonishing three-dimensional figures to tell stories within stories. Together they tell the story of a troll child who is on a quest to gather tales “for the asking, the giving, and the keeping.” Along the way, you will be told the tales of “The Troll Bride,” “The Tale of The Bad Troll,” and “The Tale of The Pride of Anhold Honeybag.”

Trolls affirms that trolls are real, that they have lived and are living now. The texture of the world and the deeply immersive, cinematic images will appeal to the legions of fantasy—and Froud—fans. This book is not only a celebration of fantastical art but also a celebration of the power of stories.

I didn't realize I borrowed the French version from the library until I got it back to my house. This book is really big and heavy so I just went with it, though "Anhold Honeybag" was something else...basically since the book was written in England I felt I probably lost some of the nuances of language, also there were the occasional French word I didn't know.

But that didn't take away from any of the art of course. Brians artwork was beautiful and Wendy's little figurines ranged from cute and adorable to haunting and outright creepy. You can of course also see the influence Froud had on the movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, many of the trolls looked like the wise Mystics. But that just made me enjoy this book more. In fact Froud was in discussion with Henson to make another movie and what ended up in this book was stuff they were thinking of using.

Along with the art there is of course a story. A coming of age story for a young troll, he is sent on a quest to find four stories he can claim as his own. To represent each story a trinket is attached to one's tail and over the years one collects more and more, a trolls are great storytellers and to keep to stories alive there is someone who is in charge of remembering and retelling them. As the young troll starts his collection we get to hear those four stories. His travels takes him scary trolls that dance in fields to catch rabbits, a swamp with three witch sisters, and even a foray into the human world where he befriends a young girl.

A beautiful book and I'll need to try to hunt down more of Brian and Wendy's work, truly magical stuff.