Review - Gobiln Quest (Jig the Goblin, Book 1) by Jim C. Hines (4/5 stars)

This is the first book in the Jig the Goblin trilogy by Jim C. Hines.  This was a humorous and entertaining classic dungeon crawl adventure.

Jig the goblin is the runt of the goblin community.  When he accidentally gets tangled up on a quest with two humans, a dwarve, and an elf he finds himself having to be more courageous than ever...which is something a goblin never is.  Jig will face off against a necromancer and a dragon and become the worshiper of a forgotten god, and all he wanted to do was get off of muck duty for a day...

This was a very amusing and humorous book.  This book is very much a classic dungeon crawling adventure; with a lot of irony and dark humor thrown in.  You got all your stereotypical characters: an elven thief, a human mage, and dwarven warrior.  You got all your stereotypical villans: an evil dragon and an evil necromancer.   But, all the characters and situations have some rather comical twists thrown into them.  So, even though they are stereotypical (which is part of their charm) they are also rather quirky.

This was a great classic adventure novel; you don't see too many of those around these days.  There weren't any huge surprises but this was an easy and amusing read.  If you are into adventure quests with some satire you would like this...think Piers Anthony, Terry Prattchet, stuff like that.

There were a couple things that could have been better in this book.  The book takes a bit to get going.  The characters were amusing but I was never really drawn into actually caring about them.  The plot was also somewhat engaging, but never really had me on the edge of my seat and never really grabbed me and made the book hard to put down.  The writing style is very straight-forward and easy to read, but nothing phenomenal.

This book was very complete.  The main points of the adventure were solved and the book was well wrapped up.

Overall this was a fun and amusing read.  I look forward to reading the next book in the series "Goblin Hero".  Hines is definitely an author to keep an eye on; especially if you enjoy humor in you classic fantasy.

 

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:

- The 100+ Book Reading Challenge
- 1st in a Series Reading Challenge