THE ROVER

This amiable, inoffensive Tolkienesque fantasy from bestselling author Odom will satisfy the same teenaged and young adult readers who flock to the author's Buffy and Angel novelizations. Older readers, however, will find the adventures of Wick, the book's hobbit-sized dweller hero, tedious. As a "Third Level Librarian in the Vault of All Known Knowledge," Wick can read, unlike most of the odd creatures he meets—oxymoronic "big dwarves," trolls, goblinkin, Boneblights—in a series of contrived encounters that make up the overlong story. Shanghaied by pirates (dwarves who seem on the verge of bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan's "Tarantara, tarantara"), Wick saves the pirate ship from a flaming female Embyr, but the plot doesn't really catch fire until midway through, when humans, in particular the engaging leader of a band of thieves to whom Wick is sold as a slave, push the dwarves offstage. In the familiar tradition of The Lord of the Rings, Wick rescues a beautiful elven lady from a web spun by a huge spider, decodes a puzzle using his reading skills and defeats a colossal dragon by inadvertently dropping its gem-heart into a lava mountain. It's no wonder that by tale's end "the little librarian," as the author likes to refer to Wick, has grown in self-confidence and esteem. With the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring on the horizon, this knock-off from the Master can only benefit from the reading public's insatiable appetite for all things Tolkienian. (Aug. 27)