Hilda’s dishonesty seems to come from a decent enough place. Hilda tells her mom she’s going off to do something innocuous, gets into a crazy adventure that Pearson details in a single drawing (although in truth it seems like it would be enough to power an entire graphic novel), and then she makes up some excuse about why she is late or wet to her increasingly suspicious mother.

She rushes home to a very awkward Sunday dinner with her mother, whom she keeps the truth of what she was up to away from in a humorously desperate way, as the little elves from the little house she just saved wander about the kitchen counter and acclimate themselves to giant people foodstuffs.Īnd so begins a pattern that Pearson repeats in montage fashion. When we first encounter Hilda, she is involved in a particularly Hilda-like adventure: She and Twig are giving chase to a small, endtable-sized patch of ground that has sprouted legs and run off, with a tiny little house full of tiny little people atop it that our heroine is trying to save. Hilda and The Stone Forest, being the fifth book, probably isn’t the best place to start, but it’s not at all a bad place to start, either. There are certain threads that run through the books, but each has its own conflict and drama that is introduced, escalated, and resolved…for the most part. Hilda, her mom, and even Twig are such strong and universally recognizable characters that one need not know exactly who they are and how they came to be they reveal themselves almost instantaneously. While Pearson’s books lead one into the next in an ongoing narrative, each is also fairly complete on its own. The world of the Hilda books is like the one in fairy tales, like the one people generations ago sincerely believed they lived in, and, perhaps most relevantly, like the one that children feel they live in, particularly when they are at play.

He actualizes and modernizes the traditional, superstitious, folk tale version of the Old World, where sprites, spirits, and supernatural creatures regularly rub elbows with regular, everyday people. Insatiably curious and excitable, Hilda regularly finds herself in fairly fantastic adventures, which, in the Scandinavian-inspired half-fantasy world Pearson has built for her, isn’t too terribly hard to do.

Hilda is a little blue-haired girl who lives with her mom and her fox-with-antlers pet Twig, first in a remote mountain cottage and then, later, in the city of Trolberg. If you’re not yet familiar with Hilda, let’s rectify that immediately.

Stone hilda