I had high hopes for The Sea of Trolls, back when it came out. I was knocked out by The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer’s previous book, and, you know, magic! trolls! the Lindisfarne Gospels! And I enjoyed the book a fair amount, but I wasn’t knocked out by it, as I remember, and I was disappointed by that. So when I discovered that her next book was a sequel to Sea of Trolls, I wasn’t particularly eager to get hold of it.
My habit of keeping an eye on the YA section of the library paid off, though, as eventually a copy of The Land of the Silver Apples showed up, and I (somewhat grudgingly, particularly considering that Sea of Trolls wasn’t a bad book, after all) picked it up and took it home and read it. And liked it. Oh, there were some mushy bits in the middle, but for the most part the book was exactly what it ought to have been: an adventure story full of magic and mystery, with lots of Big Ideas tucked into that you can safely ignore if you want to. And a lot of history, too. The Bad Guys are much scarier and more formidable (to me) than the Bad Guys in Sea of Trolls, and although Our Heroes don’t use any particularly clever or unexpected method to overcome them, they do have unexpected depths. And there are surprises; the book is much darker than it initially sets out to be.
I wonder if a Christian reader would be put off by the rather vicious anti-clerical stuff, or whether it would seem that Ms. Farmer is attacking only bad priests and monks. There are sympathetic priests and monks, after all, even though they work largely outside the church structures for most of the book, and are surprisingly tolerant of the pagan influences on their Christian friends, and are really very surprisingly tolerant indeed of the Pagans. This suits me just fine: the Good Christians are tolerant of other faiths and of the influence of those faiths on other Good Christians, and the Bad Christians are exceptionalists, and in addition are greedy, lazy, slovenly and dishonest. I’m not saying it’s true, mind you, I’m just saying it’s unfairness doesn’t bother me.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.