Jim Hines had me at “junior roller derby girl.” As Flash Hottie of the Windy City Rollers Haymarket Rioters I skated with the grownups, and as a speed skater for Fleetwood Speed, I got to know the power and determination of the junior derbs of Chicago. So I had to jump at Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen, a middle-grade book with a tween derby skater turned goblin queen.
Tamora is motherless, living with her Korean nurse father and her autistic brother, heartbroken at the disappearance of her best friend Andre. Tamora has been trained in courage, speed, and scientifically-applied aggression by her junior roller derby team, the Honey Badgers. With skates, derby skills, and a big heart, she’s ideally equipped to do battle with the elves who kidnapped her friend.
What is roller derby? If you’re over 60, you’ve seen it on TV in the 1970s. If you’re under 100, you’ve had a chance to see it live anytime since the early Aughts, when the sport was revived, sans the corporate sponsorship that built it up and then killed it dead 50 years ago.
If you’re watching it, derby is chicks on skates knocking each other down. If you’re doing it, derby is liquid fire, mainlining empowerment to every cell in your body. It is Fight Club on skates. It does for girls what riding horses can do except, and this is important for you parents who can’t afford to buy your daughter the equivalent of a boat that poops, it costs a fraction of the amount and is actually less dangerous, even though she is learning to hit people. Actually, it wouldn’t hurt to encourage your daughter to learn how to hit people, in a controlled environment, with padding and rules. It could save her a lot of grief in later life. Think of it as aikido on wheels.
Anyway, if you love derby, you’ll get your fix early in this nonstop adventure. If you like your heroes working-class rather than drawn from the pretty people, you’ll prefer the goblin slobs who invade Tamora’s suburban world, ready for battle, guided a prophecy invented by the elves, their world’s ruling class, to set the goblins up for defeat. The elves are the evil, pretty ones. Their dragon is definitely not pretty, and Tamora’s victory over it is epic. And she does it on skates.
I walked into Hines’ goblin world at this point, not having read earlier volumes in this world, and while I could tell there were other adventures going on in stories outside this one, I didn’t miss them. This was a wild ride from start to finish.
And I got my derby fix. I hoped Jim Hines would get it right … and he did. Flash Hottie says so.
Get Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen in ebook and print.
(Jim C. Hines, 2020)
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I’ve written two books with roller derby in them and plan to do at least a couple more. In The Hinky Genie Lamp I got to seduce my reformed-nymphomaniac fraud cop heroine to the derby side of the force, and for A Hinky Taste of You, the next volume of my Hinky Chicago series, I had the supreme felicity of writing a roller derby vampire romance, in which a vegan-turned-energy-vampire is able to evade her moral doom as an ecological black hole when she discovers that skating derby generates more prana than you started out with. Taste was actually written first, inspired, believe it or not, by a hate review on Amazon. The reviewer complained that she hates first person narrative and the book she was reviewing was in first person so Nyah, here’s one star. (That book was in third person. Just sayin’.) I was so intrigued by the suggestion that I gave it a shot, and put it in present tense for good measure. Man, that book got written fast. Don’t you love when that happens?
