Customer Reviews

Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls (A Random House Pictureback)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a book I always had great memories of growing up. The stories are classics and the illustrations are fantastic. It took me a while to track this down now that I have a child of my own, but it's just as good as I remembered it.

I totally agree- this book is fabulous...the illustrations are crazy! Just a few examples of some denizens of John O'Brien's world: a kiwi-like bird with booted legs carrying three people piggybacked on his back (wish I had italics); a small head, sorta trollish, with feet coming out directly from under the head (no neck, torso, legs are present); a running dude with a small, wooden building encasing his head and upper body- he has reins about a small person who is riding a possibly legless "kiwi"...and this is just in one illustration! It sounds creepier than it is, so do not panic. The book contains three short stories retold by George Jonsen: "The Three Billy Goats Gruff", "The Trolls and the Pussy Cat", and "The Stone Cheese". Hopefully, the first story is universally known to all...the second story is about a pack of trolls who take over a family's house every Christmas Eve. They sleep in the beds, pig out, break stuff- yeah, they act like a pack of trolls. A hunter who asks to sleep over saves the day when his polar bear, who an unwary, teasing troll believes to be a pussy cat, throws the troll out the door and all his comrades follow, never to harass the family again. The third story involves a giant troll that tries to scare off three brothers so that they do not cut down trees in the forest. He does scare off the two elder brothers, but the youngest one brings a ball of cheese with him. When the troll accosts him, he pretends that the cheese is a stone, and he proceeds to squeeze water from the "stone", much to the troll's horror. From that day on, the troll cut the family firewood and even hauled the logs back to their house. Get this book pronto...in all my years of going to thrift stores (seven spent on lookin' at kids' books), I have only found one other book like this with this type of John O'Brien's artwork (just several months ago). When I looked up his stuff on Amazon, it seemed his artwork had metamorphosed into something tamer. This book belongs to the weird at heart.