I finished reading the Rover last night by Mel Odom. It was about a hobbit (I mean Dweller) who gets stuck with a bunch of dwarven thieves (I mean gets kidnapped by a bunch of dwarven pirates), gets kidnapped by trolls (well rival goblin pirates), does a lot of other things, and eventually ends up killing a dragon.
Even though, it read as a pretty blatant ripoff of the Hobbit (Tolkien would likely sue), I have to say it wasn’t really that bad. The characters were interesting but the ones whom you thought would wind up being main characters didn’t because the one Dweller character kept getting stuck in bad situations.
His innate ability at jinxosity ™ would make him one poor travelling companion. Wick (the main character) had all of the following happen and then some: attacked by some type of undead (wrong place wrong time), kidnapped by pirates, sold to goblins for slavery, forced to become a “thief” when a master thief bought him, chased by demon wizards (well not demons but ultra powerful compared to everything else) and goblins, forced to spend a night in a crypt, captured by another rogue band of mercenaries, chased by a dragon, etc.
The charm of the book is that it read as a stand alone novel. There was some hinting that a future book could possibly come out but I am not likely to read it. The writing style was nice and it read like a serial, all the chapters but the last one ended on a cliff hanger. It made it some really easy reading and hard to put down even though you could see exactly where the action would take you.
Odom isn’t the best writer I have found out there but for a nice night of stand alone reading (there are way too many fantasy trilogies) this hit the spot for me. In places it read better than Tolkein. He had a better pace than Tolkein in the Hobbit anyway. But, the world he wrote about wasn’t nearly as immersive.
On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give it a 7.