Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The ‘Hildafolk’ series of books by Luke Pearson are adventures for children featuring a small blue-haired little girl called Hilda, who wanders the countryside exploring and adventuring, accompanied by her pet, Twig the ‘deerfox’: a doglike creature who has antlers. The six books in the series have now been reprinted in hardcover ‘bind-up’ editions, two books to each volume because they handily fall into three sets of related adventures. The first collection Hilda: The Wilderness Stories features Hilda & The Troll and Hilda & The Midnight Giant which both take place in the countryside. The second collection Hilda: The Trolberg Stories reprints Hilda and the Bird Parade and Hilda and the Black Hound which are both set in the city where Hilda and her mother live now.

Hilda: The Night of the Trolls collects the last two books Hilda and the Stone Forest and Hilda and the Mountain King in a single ‘bind-up’ edition with the same cloth spine and hardcovers as the other two. Unlike Luke Pearson’s previous Hilda stories, these two are halves of one long adventure, with Hilda and the Stone Forest ending on quite a dramatic cliffhanger before the concluding second half Hilda and the Mountain King came along much later.

This final ‘bind-up’ of Hilda stories doesn’t do the obvious thing of editing or rejigging pages to merge the two halves into one continuous thrillride. Instead it maintains the break between them as two separate chapters by simply reprinting both books without changing anything. This also means there are fewer special extras in this volume, with only five pages of sketches, bookplate designs and an unused cover.                                                 

It’s convenient to have the final two-part Hilda adventure together under one cover, but since this is no cheaper than buying the two books separately fans who already have the earlier editions won’t miss much by skipping this collection. Readers discovering this series for the first time and enthusiastic viewers of the animated Hilda adventures shown on Netflix should definitely jump on here.