The Goblin Crown

The Goblin Crown
by Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Recommended Ages: 12+

Billy Smith is introduced to us as "a weird-looking kid," with the dark skin and curly red hair of a child of mixed-race parents. He's a misfit in other ways as well, so his first day of high school isn't a social high point. He spills spaghetti on the letter jacket of a popular jock named Kurt. He brushes off the friendly overtures of a breathtakingly cute girl named Lexi. He's worried about his dad, who has cancer. And he's been having funny spells all day. It's almost as if he keeps being pulled into another dimension. And then it happens again, at the worst possible moment, when Kurt is chasing him and Lexi into a culvert and disaster strikes. Suddenly, two confused boys and a seriously injured girl find themselves deep inside a mountain, surrounded by goblins.

The good news is, goblins aren't the mindless, uncultured brutes humans rumor them to be. They can be dangerous, but there's more to them than that. And a certain cowardly but intelligent goblin named Hop is luckily the first to spot the three human kids in the passages deep beneath the goblin city of Kiranok. He recognizes that one of the boys – his first guess is Kurt – must be the promised heir to the line of goblin kings, who have all (funnily enough) been humans, brought from another world just in time to save goblinkind from disaster. And disaster is definitely at hand, with the goblins at war (once again) with the neighboring human kingdom of Hanor, who this time look like they're going to stamp out the goblin race for good.

Between the goblin crown and the head destined to wear it, there's an even more immediate threat: General Sawtooth, a fanatical goblin general who wants to rule his race with absolute power, even if it means destroying it. His incompetent leadership is well on track to do just that. And he has no qualms about murdering a few human children to maintain his grip on power.

The attempt to crown Kurt is a bust. The kids, along with their goblin allies, get caught, tried, and sentenced to death – after an indefinite term of exile to a remote outpost called the Fastness. Billy privately knows that despite his hesistancy, he's really the kid who should have tried for the crown. But the chance of doing so is even more remote, and the path to taking that chance is fraught with peril. The Hanorians are pressing closer to Kiranok. The goblin defenders are in a desperate fix. Billy's shot at getting his friends out from under a death sentence, and proving himself worthy to wear the goblin crown, hinges on a terrifying test of nerve and skill – and then even more dangerous stuff. And he'll have to go through General Sawtooth before it's over.

This is a thrilling, captivating, world-building fantasy. It has mad elves, giant wolves, aviators who fly into combat on enormous bats, and a richly realized goblin culture complete with its own distinct accent and vocabulary. It has subtle political agendas, complex personalities, and two opposing forms of magic (more or less light and dark) that can both accomplish terrible and wonderful things, and that can also exact an awful cost on their practitioners. It has multiple main characters who find courage at the bottom of their own cowardice, and (one way or another) reach out and grasp it. It has exciting contests, grisly battles, ominous portents and few delicate touches of romance. And it has a great dramatic structure, building up to a big finish that is, at the same time, both completely satisfying and master-crafted to hook you for the sequel.

This is the first book of the "Billy Smith and the Goblins" trilogy, followed up by The Fallen Star and The Final Drop. Robert Hewitt Wolfe is a name I've known since I was a pimply, teenaged fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He wrote the episode "A Fistful of Datas" and went on to contribute some 30 episodes to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He also developed an unproduced concept by the late Gene Roddenberry into the five-year series Andromeda, adapted Jim Butcher's Dresden Files as a single-season TV show that I watched with pleasure, and contributed scripts to several other TV series and TV movies, including Elementary, The Dead Zone, The 4400, etc. This trilogy seems to be his only three published books.