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Reviewed by Awesome Indies
May 22, 2014
You’ll Be Left Feeling Warm In Your Heart
5 stars.
You know what you get when you mix carbonated soda with a lump of rock? Sometimes you end up with a slobbering, six-eyed beast that’ll eat practically everything. Sometimes you think your little brother is trying to mess with you (on exactly the same day you’re humiliated in a contest of who can tolerate more habanero peppers), and then other times there really is a hole under his bed, leading down to a cave full of trolls.
Troll Fizz and Peppers is nonstop fun. From the initial adolescent teasing, the dares, the habanero-eating contest, and all the hilarity that came next, the book started off at a nice run and never really let up. What’s even better is when you think you know how the book’s progressing, you’re pretty sure of where the next plot twist might end up taking you, or you figure you have the ending pretty much nailed. In this book, you don’t. Troll Fizz has some of that great, adolescent, darts-in-the-dark, oddball twistiness that really needs to be seen more in Young Adult books.
Everyone in the book is pure genius. As in they’re well-written, with the same quirky goodness that helps propel the story through its bizarre and endless (endlessly fun) tunnel-like plot. Favorites were Sid with his Super Spy Guy utility gear and guide, and Grand with her rambling cleverness, flakiness and bravery.
If you’re a fan of well-written and very cleanly edited books, and if you prefer the color lavender, popping popcorn, delicious cupcakes, thrum bogs, dangerous daycare centers, and a good moral about why people fight each other (and why it’s pretty much pointless), this book will most likely give you a few good chuckles. After that, you’ll be left feeling warm in your heart, and in need of some really good homemade baked goods.
If there’s one tiny bone to pick with the book, it’s that the trolls don’t seem too menacing or dangerous until the very end (around 85% of the way through, when it’s about time for a war), when they suddenly seem very, very dangerous indeed. Perhaps I wanted it all to be sort of fun child’s play, but it took an awfully quick turn for the dark. In the end it turns out just peachy, but for just a few minutes there, the tone of the book changed.
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