Goblin Hero: Jim C. Hines
By: 
They call him Jig Dragonslayer and who is he to deny a legend. After all, common sense – something in very short supply among goblins – has a lot to do with Jig’s continued existence. Though he’s been captured by adventurers and dragged unwillingly along on their foolish quest, he’s survived both the Necromancer and the Dragon. If people want to insist he’s a hero, he isn’t going to fight about it. But the trouble with being labeled a hero is that everyone expects you to keep doing heroic things. And all Jig wants to do is worship his forgotten god, hang out with his pet fire-spider, and heal humiliating goblin injuries.
But to Kralk, the current head goblin, Jig is a threat to her power. So when an ogre comes to seek Jig Dragonslayer’s help against an unnamed enemy that’s destroying or enslaving all of ogrekind, Kralk insists he accept the challenge. With a large, exceptionally dumb goblin and an ancient, crotchety goblin who can barely walk as his unwanted sidekicks – and pursued by a goblin who’s certain that she’s meant to be the true goblin hero – Jig sets out for ogre territory.
After all, being killed by a magical enemy that can terrify an ogre is probably no worse than being killed by your “friends…”
Goblin Hero follows Goblin Quest in a series of misadventures of the unwilling hero named Jig. In the beginning of the tale we are told of the transformation of a scrawny, nerdy, weakling muck worker into a dragon slayer. With a god firmly planted in poor Jig’s mind and a fire-spider in his pocket, he looks nothing the part of hero. Songs are made to glorify his triumphs against the evil necromancer and the horrible dragon that was slain by sheer luck.
Of course, like most heroes, something always seems to go wrong. What happens when you rid the world of its fire-breathing dragon and loot the gold and weapons from his lair without thought to what might happen after that? Why the world gets overrun by pixies! Little mischievous flying balls of color seem to be the bane of ogre society and in turn the goblin’s world as well. Who better to save the day then the great hero Jig Dragonslayer! This is the same scrawny guy who no one wanted to admit to being healed by even though nearly the entire population went to him. He sort of reminds me of Nemo with the gimpy fin except he has a gimpy ear, wears spectacles which is completely unbefitting a goblin, oh and of course he looks like a red-headed stepchild except for the redheaded part, he is just relatively bald and blue skinned.
He is joined by a typical dumb football player warrior type and an ancient nanny whose sole purpose in life is the pleasure of beating another person with either one of her canes, both of which were of course told by the chief to make sure that the GREAT Jig Dragonslayer does not make it back alive. Meanwhile those three find themselves stalked by a large-and-thinks-she’s-in-charge wannabe sorcerer who deems herself the ‘true hero’ just because she happens to have the book of heroes on her person. Her weapons of mass destruction are her wooden magical staff of doom and her book of magic with its torn, charred, missing and otherwise abused binding and pages. What heroine is not complete without a billowing cloak which seems to only serve the purpose of flaring out at the right moments when she attempts to draw together magic in her mind’s eye, her attempts to cast her grand spells never seeming to actually work?
Through the journey there are the deaths of pretend comrades, blood and gore and apparently the eating of pixie corpse’s shows that their color goes out the same shade it went in and of course exploding snakes because well when you feed a multi-headed snake with no tail, where do you think the food goes? There is mind control, rocking throwing (oh come on, they are goblins after all, what goblins aren’t pros at throwing rocks?!), sneaky pitfalls and traps being set and tripped, fire and ice, really deep AND high pits of doom, and a whole lot of story.
This is a fantastical tale that will leave you laughing loudly and shaking your head in amazement when you figure out that somehow, the little guy actually lived through that particular challenge and continuously wondering when the next attempt at backstabbing the leader will be. I completely enjoyed this book and would recommend it from the teen age on up because though it is fantasy, it can be shown that hey, little guys CAN grow up to be heroes despite the challenges of rock lizards and fire spider lairs. Now I have to go and buy the original tale of Goblin Quest just to find the hilarious passages in there.
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Publisher: DAW (May 1, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0756404428
ISBN-13: 978-0756404420