I'm mot entirely sure what I just read. The story is set in a world where trolls are real. Our protagonist, a young man, finds a young troll being abused by a gang of youngsters. He rescues the troll and decides to nurse him back to health. From then on the story gets more complicated, as the protagonist develops an unhealthy obsession with the animal, and the world around him (relationships, job) crumbles.

Despite the brevity, the book also packs interesting punches: the similarities between keeping a wild animal at home and buying a young child bride from an improverished country and keeping her under lock and key, the obsession (and perhaps sexualisation) of wild animals in popular culture, the objectification of beautiful people, etc.

The book is well written (mostly), the characters are vivid, and the story is engaging. It is shocking enough to make one gasp, but not overly emotional. The ending, in particular, is well executed - it's unexpected and allegorical, in a nice way.

I didn't like the myriad digressions the author took to quote fairy tales, old books, and imagined news articles about trolls and their role in human life. I just didn't find them playing an important role in the story, and most seemed to have been there just for show.

Overall - I'd recommend this book. It is genuinely thought provoking and the topic is handled very neatly.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

I found this one hard to get into as the actual storyline of Angel and the troll was scarce between the large portions of research on trolls. I stopped at around 20% as I found the research was too long winded and found myself wanting to skip over it to get back to the story of Angel and when I did I wasnt overly invested in what was happening. A shame as the concept sounded very interesting, but turned out not to be for me.

Reads like a natural history of the Troll on modern Finland. Not quite what I expected.
And I wasn't a fan of the writing style because it was unstructured and hard to follow, it could be because it's an early translation or the Kindle formating but it wasn't a good reading experience

I requested this book because as a child my grandparents bought a troll from Norway. It was a horrible scary creature that lived in the room my sister and I slept in. So we moved the troll to my grandparents room and hid it somewhere. By morning though the troll had come back. This may have sounded scary but it wasn't, this is a memory of my grandparents that I cherish.

A book about a troll, yes please! However, this is not the book I was looking for. Very confused by the storyline and I did DNF.

This review isn't going to be long, because I simply think I didn't get what was the point. The story is weird but not in a nice, purposful way (at least for me). Undertstanding why and what mattered, why the events were important flew way above me, and created a story that I only wanted to be done with, not really caring about the characters. It's a little sad, because the premice hooked me up. Troll? Hell yes! But the way the relationship is built, the interactions with the various characters, all felt off.
Sorry, for the low rating, but I can't see what would please other people like I usually do.