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Rating: 
Summary: This Novel Will Give You Pause!
Review: By definition, a troll is a supernatural creature from Scandinavian folklore that lives in caves or in mountains. It is stumpy, mishapen, and can be as big as a giant or a small as a dwarf. It has been known to abduct children. Trolls have made appearances in such literary works as BEOWULF, LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER. With that in mind, you should be prepared for the unexpected in this novel by the Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo. You will not be disappointed. This writer has crafted a bizarre but strangely moving love story between Mikael, nicknamed Angel, a young Finnish photographer, and a troll whom he rescues from a pack of hoodlums one midnight as the young man staggers home from a night of drinking and unrequited lust for one Martes, who says he is only looking for "good conversation." Angel takes the troll in, nurses him back to health and starts down a path from which there is no return. With each passing day, Angel finds himself becoming more hopelessly attached to the troll with the juniper-berry smell-- whom he names Pessi-- and having to hide his new housemate from his friends and neighbors. As you would expect, a novel about a love affair between a man and a troll will not have a happy ending. Even so, I was not quite ready for the explosive finale.Ms. Sinisalo's prose is both concise and evocative: "I look him [Martes] in the eyes. His face wears a friendly, open, and understanding smile. He seems at once infinitely lovable and completely unknown. His eyes are computer icons, expressionless diagrams, with infinite wonders behind them, but only for the elect, those able to log on." The author raises questions about man's relationship with wild creatures-- how much we know or don't know about them and what they know about us. She seems to say something about the animalistic tendences that lie deeply hidden in the most civilized of us just waiting to be let loose. Although on one level, TROLL is just a great story that you cannot stop reading, on another it asks questions about the very nature of us all.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disturbing Tale with a Tail
Review: It is my general policy not to write a negative review of a book. As an author, I try to support other writers and not tear them down. However, I occasionally make an exception, and Troll is one of them. I decided to write this after I committed to reviewing all the short-listed Gaylactic Spectrum Award nominees for Best Novel, and because I have yet to read or hear anything negative about this book. I think it's time another point of view is heard.
First published in Finland where it won the coveted Finlandia Prize for best novel, and then translated into English, Troll has received almost nothing but praise. The book came to me highly recommended, but I simply hated it. My first challenge was the writing. The style is simple and direct, almost too simple at times. It's also written in the present tense, an unusual choice and, for many readers, rather disconcerting. It's not an easy book to get into. The highlight for me was the alternating chapters that were "taken" from various resources on trolls. The encyclopedia and book entries were so well-written that you almost believed that trolls could be real. If only the actual story was that compelling.
I found the story itself to be extremely disturbing. The author goes out of her way early in the book to establish that Pessi is a wild animal on a par with a gorilla, and a juvenile animal at that. When the mounting sexual attraction culminates in a sex scene of sorts, I wanted to throw the book across the room and wash my eyes out with soap. In the end, the author tries to challenge your thoughts on what is culturally acceptable and warn you against making pre-judgments, but I thought the attempt was clumsy at best. Even if you assume that trolls are the equivalent of humans and therefore Angel is not into bestiality, he would still be a [...] since it was well-established that Pessi is immature, barely more than a toddler from the descriptions. Other readers have addressed none of these issues, so I can only assume that they only bothered me.
There is no doubt that this is an unusual and original book, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is good.
Rating: 
Summary: Not at all like your Troll Doll
Review: It's difficult to convince people that they should read this book. Begin by mentioning that it is about a gay man who adopts a troll, add that it is pretty erotic and they begin to notice things about YOU that they had never quite seen before, but yes....now that you mention it....hmmm. This is a kinky fairytale or like a dream gone over the edge.
The protagonist is not Angel, the handsome blonde photographer, but Pessi the troll whom we can't wait to read about, can't wait to see growing and thriving. It is Pessi who rivets us to the end, with his dark presence, his quick moves, his unpredictability, his shadowlike gtace. And it is that shadow quality that might explain the mysterious ending. Cuckoo, cuckoo.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange and Captivating
Review: This strange, captivating novel, winner of Finland's top prize for fiction, is set in a familiar world just slightly askew from our own. The basic premise is quite simple, in the book, trolls are real creatures found primarily in northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia, and are treated as a rare species of animal. They were definitively "discovered" in 1907, but have since remained elusive to science, and little is known about them. Although they tend to keep far away from human settlements, the book opens in a city (presumably Helsinki) with a good-looking young gay photographer (Mikael) coming across a sick young troll late a night. Stumbling home drunk and depressed from a failed night of wooing, Mikael's judgment is poor and he brings the creature into his apartment.
Rising the next day, he finds it wasn't all a hallucination, and starts trying to nurse the ill young creature back to health. Of course, the notion of keeping a troll as a pet is unthinkable (not to mention illegal), and so he must conceal his new housemate at all costs. The problem is that he doesn't know anything about trolls. Fortunately, through the power of the internet, he is able to call up all manner of fables, scientific journal articles, poems, and bits of information about them. These wholly believable extracts are interspersed throughout the book with chapters headed with the name of the person from whose perspective it's written. In addition to the photographer, narrator's include his unrequited love/creative partner (Martes), a former love and nebbish bookworm (Ecke), and a Filipino mail-order bride who lives in captivity in an apartment one floor down (Palomita). Mikael rather clumsily uses his physical charms to seduce both Ecke and another former lover into providing key bits of information about trolls. As the nursing succeeds, the troll grows healthier and stronger, and there becomes a noticeable juniper-berry odor in the apartment. This is the scent of the troll's pheromones, and Mikael becomes steadily more infatuated with the creature, who reciprocates and treats him as the Alpha-maleóalas Mikael is slow to realize the consequences of this, with horrible results.
The author does a thoroughly convincing job of portraying the troll and its behavior, as well as the narcissistic photographer and his little world. Three strong subplotsóone about the mail-order bride, one about a job creating a photo for a new line of blue jeans, and one about his realization that Ecke is a good catchóall buttress the story and give it depth. The book does a nice job of using fairy tales and becoming one itselfóan entertaining fable on the relationship of the natural world to man's world.
Rating:
Summary: What an odd and interesting novel
Review: Troll is both more and less than you might think, reading the 'reviews' here on Amazon. The novel is about a photographer adopting a wild troll. In his world, trolls were discovered to be real in 1907 although encounters with them are so extremely rare that there is very little real cataloguing of habits, eating, mating, etc. Much of the book has excepts from poetry, stories, fables and well-faked scientific treatises. The story happens in between these excepts. The story itself is fascinating. Angel is a believable protagonist and, his gayness aside, completely sympathetic. He could be me, were I gay. If I met the troll Pessi, I'd have adopted him too. It is quite short. I finished it in 3 days of commuting to work and I'm having some trouble getting it out of my mind. If you are looking for an odd love story, this is a good one. If you are looking for straightforward narrative or action, it may not. Sinisalo reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in her depiction of horror in everyday life and the likability of her characters. If you are an Oates fan, you will like this very much.
Rating:
Summary: What an odd and interesting novel
Review: Troll is both more and less than you might think, reading the 'reviews' here on Amazon. The novel is about a photographer adopting a wild troll. In his world, trolls were discovered to be real in 1907 although encounters with them are so extremely rare that there is very little real cataloguing of habits, eating, mating, etc. Much of the book has excepts from poetry, stories, fables and well-faked scientific treatises. The story happens in between these excepts. The story itself is fascinating. Angel is a believable protagonist and, his gayness aside, completely sympathetic. He could be me, were I gay. If I met the troll Pessi, I'd have adopted him too. It is quite short. I finished it in 3 days of commuting to work and I'm having some trouble getting it out of my mind. If you are looking for an odd love story, this is a good one. If you are looking for straightforward narrative or action, it may not. Sinisalo reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in her depiction of horror in everyday life and the likability of her characters. If you are an Oates fan, you will like this very much.
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