From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Nine Goblins, a tale of low fantasy and high mischief.
No one knows exactly how the Goblin War began, but folks will tell you that goblins are stinking, slinking, filthy, sheep-stealing, henhouse-raiding, obnoxious, rude, and violent. Goblins would actually agree with all this, and might throw in “cowardly” and “lazy” too for good measure.
But goblins don't go around killing people for fun, no matter what the propaganda posters say. And when a confrontation with an evil wizard lands a troop of nine goblins deep behind enemy lines, goblin sergeant Nessilka must figure out how to keep her hapless band together and get them home in one piece.
Unfortunately, between them and safety lies a forest full of elves, trolls, monsters, and that most terrifying of creatures…a human being.

My Review:

Before you begin reading Nine Goblins – and you SHOULD read Nine Goblins – expunge everything you think you know about goblins from your head. Because these goblins are not like that at all. And considering the way that goblins (and orcs and other supposedly born evil creatures) are used in fantasy as substitutes for whatever foreign element of the population is the enemy of the day, they probably never were.

I digress, but it fits right in because Sergeant Nessilka of the Goblin Army does that too. Think about how things really are and how they’re really going to go and what’s really going to happen to her squad – even though the Goblin Army brass always leads with big hopes and high expectations that are unlikely to be realized by anyone at all, let alone the band of misfit grunts that she has the dubious privilege of herding around more or less in the direction of a battlefield.

Then again, the Goblin Wars, the wars between the humans who took over all the land that used to be goblin territory, and the goblins who gave way until they reached the far ocean and discovered that there was no place left to go except backwards, aren’t exactly what the high muckety-mucks say they were about, either.

Especially the ones on the human side. The goblins are pretty clear about where they stood, and that they’d run out of land to stand on. And if you hear the echoes of ‘manifest destiny’ in the human position on all this, you’re not imagining things. Or we’re imagining the same things.

This particular story in the midst of those terrible Goblin Wars isn’t about blood and battles. It’s absolutely not a story about the battle between good and evil, neither of which are present on the battlefield or anywhere else – which is kind of the point.

Sergeant Nessilka and the nine members of her squad who find themselves in the middle of this mess are pretty much lost and doing the best they can to get home. Because magic isn’t half so codified or functional as a whole lot of fantasy stories might lead one to believe, and they got caught up in a wizard’s spell that went very, very wrong. For select definitions of wrong – which is where magic usually goes in this world.

The wizard was just a kid who wanted to go home, and had the magical ability to make that happen. The story begins when he scoops up those nine goblins and takes them along for his ride, leaving him unconscious and a bit short of his goal, while putting the goblins 50 miles INSIDE enemy lines with no easy way to get back home and no desire – or possibly even capacity – to cut a bloody swath across human territory.

Which is how they sneak their way into the home of an elven veterinarian who prefers animals to people and goblins to humans or even elves most of the time. He’s happy to help them get home, but there’s another wizard in their way. One who is cutting a bloody swath through the countryside – and doesn’t care at all if she includes a few goblins – and at least one elf – in her bloodbath as long as she gets her way.

Escape Rating A: Nine Goblins is cozy fantasy from before cozy fantasy became cool. It’s probably a grandmother or a godmother (or both) for the whole cozy fantasy thing in one way or another, and I think that Sergeant Nessilka would be absolutely fine with that. If she had time to think about it for a minute – which she generally doesn’t.

I picked this up because Kingfisher. Really, truly, that’s the reason. I fell in love with her work when I read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and have been working my way both backwards and forwards ever since. In fact, I was listening to her latest, Hemlock & Silver, as I was reading Nine Goblins, which is one of her early works for adults. The comparison and contrast between this earlier work and her latest has been fascinating!

But she’s become so popular in the last few years – and rightfully so – that Tor Books/Tordotcom is bringing out a lot of her earlier work in spiffy, new and more widely available editions (like this year’s re-release of Swordheart with the glorious new cover) than was originally the case considering that Kingfisher originally self-published Nine Goblins on SMASHWORDS in 2013.

I’m going to squee more than a bit because I had a fantastic time with this book. It reminds me a lot of both Mary Gentle’s Grunts and Jacqueline Carey’s books Banewreaker and Godslayer and Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards, as they are all fantasy stories told from the perspective of ‘the other side’, the folks who are supposed to be ‘evil’ but are instead just people with a different agenda. If the winners write history – and they do – then these are stories told from what usually turns out to be the ‘losing’ side.

Sergeant Nessilka and her squad just want to go home. They’d also like to stop the war, but Nessilka, at least, knows that’s impossible at this point. Both sides are much too invested in revenge to come to a negotiating table, and both sides have spent lives and years in demonizing the enemy to the point that there is no trust on either side to make such negotiation possible.

But this is a cozy fantasy, which means it’s not about making war. It’s not even about waging peace – although it turns out to be. Instead, it’s about small groups on both sides who, instead of taking the knee-jerk way out when they find themselves face to face, unite against a common enemy and discover that the enemy of my enemy may not exactly be my friend but absolutely IS a person who isn’t all that different from themselves in spite of just how different they look from each other.

The story is told with wry and self-deprecating humor – as Kingfisher’s stories often are – from the first-person perspective of Sergeant Nessilka. A character who very much reads and feels like the author’s own avatar, just as Mona is in Wizard’s Guide, Halla in Swordheart, and Anya in Hemlock & Silver.

Nessilka is a ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ kind of character, and the reader empathizes with her from the beginning because she’s honest and true inside herself and honestly and truly knows that her squad is FUBAR’d but she’s still doing her damndest to get them home in the same number of pieces that they started in.

The story rollicks along, partly because of Nessilka’s marvelous internal dialog, but also because there’s just so much going on, they’re jumping from the frying pan into the fire every step, and they’re all trying so hard to succeed but the deck is so stacked against them and they keep trying anyway in spite of their collective ineptitude at almost but not quite everything. They screw up over and over, all the time, and still keep going.

And even in the messed up situation they’re in, they do it without turning to whatever the dark side would be for a squad of goblins teamed up with a grumpy elven veterinarian trying to convince a human commander that ‘no, they did not commit the murders that surround them on every side.’

For a really, really good reading time, sign up with Sergeant Nessilka. You’ll be glad you did, because the comment on the cover of Nine Goblins is absolutely right, this IS “A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief.” Nessilka and her squad are just the kind of ‘friends in low places’ that everyone needs for a reading pick-me-up and a grand escape from our reality into theirs.