Baby Trolls Get a Bad Rap
What a delight this book is. Not only is it colorful and fun, fun, FUN! It’s also very clever. Basically, three baby trolls – three very sweet baby trolls –want ‘equal rights’ with grown up trolls. And they want you, the reader, to sign a petition to help them.
I liked so many aspects of this short picture book for younger children. Firstly, I loved that the three trolls were all very different – Horatio, the smart troll, Grizelda, the super-cute troll who thinks she’s a princess, and Saul, a sort of naughty boy troll who thinks, like grown up trolls, he can be scary too. By giving them a strong, definable personality, young children, I think, will relate to them really well.
Secondly, there’s a lot of humour in the story. I loved it when Grizelda says, ‘I’m Princess Grizelda’ and then Saul says, ‘I’m Saul and she’s not a princess’. It made me chuckle. In fact, I chuckled all the way through the book. Comic timing is everything in a book like this and, I’m happy to say, Justine Avery is excellent at it.
Finally, I have to discuss the drawings. Daria Yudina, who I see is a Russian illustrator, is very, very talented. In a very simple way, she offers fun, imaginative characters for the young reader to fall in love with. I always think that in a good picture book the author is not telling the story and nor is the illustrator. In a good picture book, the author and illustrator work together to tell the story. And this is what we have here.
Wonderful!
Very sweet, very funny and very, very clever! A wonderfully written, wonderfully illustrated picture book.