

“When I was at university, everyone who studied illustration was given a project to do an illustrated map of a country, and I was given Iceland,” he said. “At the time, I was reading about trolls and daydreaming, knowing I wanted to do something with that one day.”

“My imagination was really going for it on that trip-the landscape of the place stuck with me,” Luke Pearson, the British author of the Hildafolk series of graphic novels, told me. It began, as adventures often do, with a trip: a family holiday in Norway, parents and their teen-agers, that seemed entirely straightforward at the time.

“Hilda and the Troll” is the first book in Luke Pearson’s sophisticated series for children.
