"Sixteen-year-old Jennifer
Strange and her sidekick and fellow Orphan Tiger Prawns have been driven to the
tip of the UnUnited Kingdoms - Cornwall - by the invasion of the Trolls. Their
one defense is a six-foot-wide trench full of buttons, something which the
Trolls find unaccountably terrifying (it's their clickiness). Worse than being
eaten by Trolls is the prospect of the Mighty Shandar requisitioning the
Quarkbeast and using him to achieve supreme power and domination - an ambition
that has been four hundred years in the planning and which will ultimately
leave the Earth a cold cinder, devoid of all life. Nothing has ever looked so
bleak, but Jennifer, assisted by a renegade vegan Troll, a bunch of misfit
sorcerers, the Princess (or is she now the ruler?) of the UnUnited (or are they
now United?) Kingdoms, and Tiger, must find a way to vanquish the most powerful
wizard the world has ever seen, and along the way discover the truth about her
parents, herself, and what is in the locked glovebox of her VW Beetle."
The Great Troll War is the concluding
book in The Last Dragonslayer book series –released in hardcover in September 2021 in
the UK, August of 2022 here, and finally in paperback only a few weeks ago-
took seven years to appear, but overall, it’s worth the wait –though for me,
since I started to read this series earlier this year, the wait for this last
book was only a couple weeks. Jasper Fforde does try hard to give some
backstory to the earlier books via footnotes at the bottom of the page, which
was probably designed for some fans who did not want to re-read the three
previous books –though there some other humorous ones. The
scope of this book is grander than the previous three, but the themes are
similar. Friendship, the fight for justice, and the defeat of evil. We
also finally get an explanation of how import the Quarkbeast’s truly are.
Overall, this whole series has
been fun, though it does borrow one big plot point from the Harry Potter novels.
Fforde has a rich imagination and a love for satire and much like his adult
tales, The Last Troll War is filled with many in-jokes, puns, but also some serious themes such as government corruption
and the exploitation of marginalized communities; it’s a reflection of the
issues and conflicts that exist in the real world, and it encourages readers to
think critically about power dynamics and the importance of standing up for
what is right.
And taking a page from Stephen
King, the author makes a very amusing, sort of anonymous,
cameo appearance. And it gets a bit meta…“Well," said the author, “I made George
Formby (a British comedian) president-for-life of Great Britain.” “A book about
Humpty Dumpty as a police procedural.” “A social order based wholly on the strength
of your colour vision” “Is there a sequel?” “Don’t start.” All of this are part of the rich tapestry that Jasper Fforde once described
as being "impossible worlds made real".
Overall,
another fun book by Fforde, with a fitting conclusion to the series, plus an
ending I did not see.
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