aka Not Before Sundown
Johanna Sinisalo
Completed 4/24/2016, reviewed 5/2/2016
5 stars
This is a marvelous book by a Finnish author and translated
into English. It won the Tiptree Award
in 2004. It’s sort of an urban fantasy,
taking the mythology of trolls and turning it on its head in a contemporary
setting. It’s fun, interesting, and
disturbing. The book follows Angel, a
gay photographer who saves a young troll from being beaten up by a gang of
teenagers. He brings the troll home and
tries to restore it back to health. Naturally,
taking in a wild animal is always fraught with danger, especially one that was
only confirmed as real in 1907.
Sinisalo peppers the narrative with information about trolls
from mythology, scientific research, and the internet. She achieves this without feeling like you’re
getting a biology lesson by couching it in Angel’s research on how to care for
the troll. Since trolls were only
discovered as more than a mythological creature about a hundred years earlier, there’s
not much info on them, so Angel has to wade through a lot of faerie tales and
misinformation just to figure out what to feed the troll.
Perhaps the most interesting and disturbing part of the book
is that the troll exudes a pheromone that affects Angel and the people around
him. Angel’s life is already turned
upside down by keeping a wild animal as a pet, which is illegal, and hard to
keep from the neighbors in his apartment building. It also affects his work
life and of course, his social life, as more and more people become drawn to
him. Sinisalo describes this masterfully
as the plot unfolds in a first person narrative by Angel and some of the people
affected by the presence of the troll.
But needless to say, the pheromone effect is also a bit disturbing, as
it affects his sex life as well.
It might also be the pheromones that made me give this book
such a high rating. I reserve 5 stars
for books that move me profoundly, and this one did. It reminded me a bit of “The Golum and the
Jinni” in that it brings a mythological creature into an urban setting, with
great prose and unexpected twists. The
book is short and an easy read, but I still gasped at the climax and nearly
wept at the end.
This sound wonderful. I know little of trolls although my Norwegian relatives are much more well-versed on their mythology. And the cover gave me a chuckle. :)
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