The Legend of Hobart
Heather Mullaly
Favored Oak Press
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Humor
Themes: Country Tales, Cross-Genre, Dragons, Equines, Fables, Girl Power
***+
Description
Young Hobart of Finnagen may be the seventh son of a pig farmer, but he dreams of becoming a hero. Unfortunately, he can only enter the King's School for the Education of Future Knights if three people testify to his heroic deeds on the May Day of his twelfth year, and his village is sadly devoid of damsels in need of rescue (they all practice martial arts and assure him the last thing they need is a rescuer), babies in need of saving from house fires (everyone's far too careful), or other good deeds in need of doing. Worse, Hobart's small size, stutter, and stumbling efforts whenever he does attempt acts of bravery have earned him nothing but scorn and bullying; the son of the local lord dubbed him Ho-brat and the name has sadly stuck (with the added surname "Bull Hat" after an unfortunate encounter with an angry bull). Even his family doesn't take him seriously when he tells him his dreams. With the days until May Day dwindling, Hobart decides only one deed will be heroic enough to not only get him into the school for knights, but silence his tormentors once and for all: slaying a dragon. Thus, he sets out on a quest of his very own... but what he finds along the way will make him reconsider everything he thought he knew about bravery, heroism, and what it means to be a knight.
Review
The Legend of Hobart is a light, amusing tale of a boy who wants to be a hero without quite understanding the term. Set in an idealized "once upon a time" fantasy land, it offers just enough peril to challenge Hobart and the companions he picks up along the way, providing setbacks and adventures and problems Hobart has to figure out with the four magic gifts granted by the old wise woman he consults on setting out. (Normally it's three gifts, but she's something of a nonconformist wise woman and gives him four... though whether Albert the cowardly talking horse is a gift or not is open to debate, even by Hobart.) Eventually, of course, he has his meeting with the dragon - but it goes without saying that things do not go the way he always imagined they'd go back in Finnegan. It's all a decently adventurous tale, especially for a younger reader, with some silly moments along the way, but I found the ending rushed, and it also seemed to forget a few things I was sure would come into play somehow.