Grinthy: A Goblin's Tale (Path to Power Bonus Novella)
On Thursday, January 29th, I got a newsletter e-mail from Charlotte Goodwin.
Free stuff alert!
I made a reader magnet, and it’s yours, if you want it.
It wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t really know what a reader magnet is. But now I do—it’s basically some kind of freebie to attract readers. I plan to use mine to collect newsletter subscribers, but as you already subscribe to my newsletter, you get it for free!
The book is called Grinthy—A Goblin’s tale.
This novel follows Grinthy—she was a victim in my most recent round of editing of Path to Power. In an older version, she had her own sub-plot, but I got feedback from several peopile which suggested her tale detracted from the main storyline.
This wasn’t really a surprise, as she never appeared in the first draft and was an add-in. In an early round of editing, I axed around half the original story and panicked that it was a bit short, so I tried to pack it out. Grinthy was one of the results of that.
But I actually think her tale was quite an interesting one, and didn’t deserve to be completely destroyed. So I kept the chapters I axed from Path to Power, added some more so the story made sense, fleshed it out where needed, and voilla! I brand new novella was born.
When I created Grinthy, it was in part because I wanted to give depth to the goblins of Dunia; to show the readers that goblins are a race worthy of sympathy—that most of them are just people trying to survive in an inhospitable world. I wanted to show that sometimes, otherwise good people can do things others might consider bad; heinous even. But that perhaps these once good people may have good cause, in their own minds at least, to do the things others might consider evil.
You know what? Good on Goodwin. Recycling cut content as bonus content is a great idea. This is exactly the sort of thing I wish Rebecca Yarros had done instead of packing the first third of Onyx Storm with meandering nonsense.
I did say that I was done with Goodwin and her work, but:
This novella was free.
Given that it’s composed of content that was in The Queen of Vorn but axed from Path to Power, I feel I haven’t fully completed the comparative review if I ignore this.
So let’s punch this out in one go and be done with it. Let’s roll through Grinthy: A Goblin’s Tale and see what improvements, if any, Goodwin has made from the previously-cut chapters used to create it.
STATS
Title: Grinthy: A Goblin’s Tale
Series: The Stolen Throne Trilogy (Bonus Novella)
Author(s): Charlotte Goodwin
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: January 29th, 2026
Publisher: Self-published and distributed via Book Funnel
SPOILERS
As should come as no surprise to anyone who read the Path to Power review, there is no point of warning you about spoilers. In every way that spoilers would matter, this novella is just recycled Grinthy chapters from The Queen of Vorn. Yes, Goodwin added a few new scenes and did POV swaps of a few scenes that were originally from Emma’s perspective, but these don’t substantially change the narrative.
So, if you want a review of this novella where I work around spoilers with any manner of delicacy, please see my review of the unpublished book. Parts 1 through 3 include dissections of this novella’s content in terms of mild spoilers, while Parts 4 through 6 dissect it with heavy spoilers. Here, I am just going to provide heavy, unmarked spoilers for everything in the novella.
STORY
This novella has seven chapters.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are apparent copy-paste jobs of Chapters 12, 16, and 19 of The Queen of Vorn. Any “adjustment” (as Goodwin refers to it in the novella’s foreword) is so minor as to be unnoticeable, with all of Grinthy’s character-defining moments left intact.
Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 mix the Grinthy scenes from Chapters 22 through 33 of The Queen of Vorn, with some “padding” (Goodwin’s word for it, again the foreword of the novella) to show Grinthy plotting and politicking with other goblins, plus POV shifts of:
The scene of Emma’s abduction
The scene when Atropian soldiers attack the goblin camp as rescue Emma
The goblins killing the Atropian soldiers that pursued Emma’s group, and then Emma’s group’s horses, which I count as POV shift because we were already aware of those events in “real time”, so to speak.
A little extra action shower in Grinthy’s POV in the climax.
ANALYSIS
Recap of What the Grinthy Chapters in The Queen of Vorn Did
In the unpublished book, goblins are inhuman, murderous monsters who embody the trope of the Evil Race. They see raiding human settlements and feasting on human flesh as facts of life, to the point that violent retaliation by the humans is shrugged off. They also freely murder each other over petty power struggles, abandon each other to die with zero remorse, and murder each other to preserve their right to abandon each other to die with zero remorse.
Among these monsters, Grinthy is our sole POV. This is a problem, because she repeatedly demonsrates that she is a violent sociopath.
We are Told she is traumatized by the deaths of her family and wants revenge, but there’s no real sense of sorrow. This is most evident when she was ready to abandon a goblin child - not because of any principle, but because the child’s scream briefly reminded her of her own children’s deaths - and then felt no emotional backlash when that goblin child died in her arms. Her family had the same emotional weight as the car in John Wick. (They should have had the same weight as the dog.)
She murders guards of a goblin city when they try to draft her to help defend the city, when her only concern is smuggling herself (just herself) out.
We are Shown that she goes out of her way to murder humans, even when doing so undermines her ability to escape and survive. Her escape from the human merchant ship in Chapter 19 didn’t in any way require her to jump into a rowboat and slaughter the humans aboard. If anything, she got one of her fellow escapees killed by making that the plan.
She readily murders or threatens to murder her fellow goblins when they don’t fall in line with what she wants.
This did not pair well with the theme of The Queen of Vorn. The foundation of the narrative was “genocide bad”, but Goodwin went out of her way to make killing the goblins seem like a necessary act, to the point that even the protagonist compared them to “rats”.
She had no love for goblins, what little she’d seen of them made her despise them. But she hated rats back on Earth, and she’d never have wished to wipe them out. All creatures had their place and a right to exist.
All this is to say that, outside of rewording the theme statement, cutting Grinthy’s POV was the single greatest improvement that Goodwin made when doing her limited rewrites for Path to Power.
Goblins in Path to Power
Goblins are still an Evil Race. They steal, they murder, and they hunger for human flesh. However, in this book, the theme has changed.
Emma had no love for goblins; what little she’d seen of them made her despite them. But she knew that for now they were Queen Lila’s focus, and while enough of them still lived, they would be the target of her hate, not the elves or the dwarves.
In other words, we shouldn’t genocide monsters, because once we run out of monsters to kill, the slippery slope of extremism will take the lives of people who actually matter. This theme is pretty borked, but at least it doesn’t crack the foundation of a story where “genocide bad” is meant to be the driving force.
What this means is that, even if Goodwin tells a story where Grinthy is a violent sociopath, it is unlikely to damage Path to Power. The theme no longer leans on the idea that goblin lives are worth sparing while the events of the narrative Show us (and, through the Main Character, double down on) that they are vermin who need to be killed to save the innocent. So Grinthy can be monstrous without undermining the theme, and therefore, without undermining the story. We can judge this story purely on its own merits.
What Goodwin Shows Us in This Novella
Meeting Goodwin on Her Own Terms
Remember, this is Goodwin’s stated objective for this novella.
When I created Grinthy, it was in part because I wanted to give depth to the goblins of Dunia; to show the readers that goblins are a race worthy of sympathy—that most of them are just people trying to survive in an inhospitable world. I wanted to show that sometimes, otherwise good people can do things others might consider bad; heinous even. But that perhaps these once good people may have good cause, in their own minds at least, to do the things others might consider evil.
She says a variation of this same thing in the foreword of the novella.
[Grinthy] entered Path to Power to give depth to the goblins of Dunia; to show the readers that goblins are a race worthy of sympathy - that most of them are just people trying to survive in an inhospitable world. I wanted to show that sometimes, otherwise good people can do things others might consider bad; heinous even. But that perhaps these once good people may have good cause, in their own minds at least, to do the things others might consider evil.
This is therefore the standard by which we will judge this novella. If Goodwin does not deliver on this, the story will be as thematically broken as The Queen of Vorn.
She Didn’t Deliver on This
In Chapter 1 (formerly Chapter 12), Grinthy still thinks that humans raiding goblin settlements is fair game, given that goblins raid human settlements. At best, this makes it seem like goblins bring killed didn’t matter until it affected her family.
In Chapter 2 (formerly Chapter 16), Grinthy still attempts to abandon a goblin child, feels zero distress when the child dies, and then turns around and murders the defenders of a goblin city so that she can smuggle herself (only herself) to safety.
In Chapter 3 (formerly Chapter 19), she still goes out of her way to murder humans in a rowboat, despite this not in any way helping her escape from the human ship.
In Chapter 4, she has zero qualms or reflection on the fact that she is hunting humans to eat their flesh. This implies that, for goblins, eating human flesh is not “heinous”. It it typical behavior that they find “good”.
In Chapter 5, she briefly wails about how the Atropian soldiers killing her new tribe (a tribe that, remember, is actively hunting humans to eat their flesh) is equivalent to her family being killed. She then turns around and murders other survivors of this attack just to establish dominance.
In Chapters 6 and 7, Grinthy continues to murder or sacrifice her fellow goblins in the name of feasting on human flesh.
Oh, and Grinthy also shows a certain delight in the taste of human blood and in wanton killing of humans. I don't remember if these details were in the original book, so either she’s still sociopathically bloodthirsty, or Goodwin had made her more bloodthirsty.
Therefore, when the story ends on the following paragraphs, it is completely nonsense:
The human had won; Grinthy had lost. With her final thought, she wondered if all of her kind would share her fate. Or would the goblins find a way to survive? Not long ago all Grinthy ever wanted was to earn an honest living, raise her children, and live in peace, like most of her kin.
But the humans hated the goblins like the goblins hated them. And hate could only ever lead to death.
Bear in mind that we were never Shown Grinthy’s desires for peace and family. Those were details mentioned in passing at the same time that the goblins’ acceptance of mutual raiding was established, and it was completely forgotten in the carnage that followed. Again, as stated above, it seems like Grinthy never really cared about peace and family, only that the consequences of goblin raiding culture didn’t personally affect her.
Failure
This is not a novella about a good person turned back by circumstance.
This is the story of a monster grasping for justification for her depravity towards others.
Its the record of a sociopath who wails about her victimhood (with no consideration for how self-inflicted that victimhood is) before delighting in the inhuman treatment of her enemies and freely shanking any of her “allies” that fail to fall into line.
All of that would be fine if it were intentional. If Grinthy were not supposed to “give depth” to the goblins, to show them as “a race worthy of sympathy” and to serve as an example of the “good people” among them, then her depravity could have instead served as an example of something that tarnishes the image of the goblins. She could have served as a cautionary tale of the sort of evil that can be used to justify prejudice or even genocide.
But that’s not what Goodwin wanted. It’s the exact opposite of what she wanted. Grinthy is supposed to be someone we can sympathize with. Goodwin could have accomplished the goal fairly easily be editing out Grinthy’s most glaring acts of evil and putting more effort into Grinthy’s character work, but instead, she just doubled down on Grinthy’s bloodlust, delight in violence towards enemies, and victim complex via the “padding”.
CONCLUSION
What a waste.
As stated at the top, I think that Goodwin’s decision to recycle the Grinthy content for a reader magnet was honestly a smart and creative idea. It allowed her to repurpose the hard work put into cut chapters, rather than discarding it outright. And she did put some effort into fleshing things out more. The “padding” was material that didn’t exist in the original novel. (It may have existed in an earlier draft, though. There is a line about an Atropian soldier being Grinthy’s first kill, when the wording of Chapter 3 made it seem like she killed at least one person in that rowboat.)
What this novella needed wasn’t “padding”, though. It needed revision. It needed edits. It needed to have the problematic elements, the ones that obviously marked Grinthy as not being one of the “good people”, buffed out, while more work was put into Showing us sympathetic aspects of Grinthy’s life.
How many of you watched John Wick lately? Do you remember just how slow the opening of that movie is? So many minutes are poured into showing us John’s grief, the hope that blossoms in his life when he receives the posthumous gift of a dog from his late wife, and how he starts making that dog a part of his everyday life. When the dog dies, we fully understand why he is prepared to go on a murderous rampage over “just a dog”. His speech to Viggo Tarasov about what that dog meant to him wasn’t forcing emotions. It provided clarity on a character arc that was already Shown.
That is the bare minimum of what this novella needed: a brand new Chapter 1, before the genocide of Grinthy’s family, to demonstrate that she is indeed one of the “good people” and explore the emotional depths of her character.
Therein lies the problem, though. Goodwin consistently demonstrates that she would prefer to Tell us about scenes of meaningful emotion - the ones that have substance, the ones that are hard to write - rather than Showing them to us. We saw that with how she skipped across Emma’s amnesia and later restoration of identity. It’s far easier to write “padding” that insists Grinthy is feeling things than to earn those emotions.
Rating: 2/10
If Goodwin hadn’t spelled out the intended purpose of this story in the foreword and her advertising e-mail, I would probably rate Grinthy: A Goblin’s Tale at a 6/10. It’s inoffensive. The worst that can really be said is that the efforts to make the Villain Protagonist sympathetic backfire, but if we approach this story as a tale of a villain who whines about self-inflicted victimhood to justify her vile behavior, I think it works well enough. Whether or not it’s worth your time to read it really comes down to personal taste.
The problem is that Goodwin set the terms by which this story should be judged. She told us what the thematic foundation is and how we’re meant to interpret this story. The story she then chose to tell (or, rather, not meaningfully edit) eats through this supposed foundation.
Therefore, I can’t rate this story any higher than The Queen of Vorn itself. It utterly fails in the one thing that drives the whole story.
To end this review , I’ll end on the same note that I ended the ARC review of Path to Power. If you are someone who genuinely enjoyed The Queen of Vorn (or now, Path to Power), or if you support Goodwin or indie authors on principle regardless of the quality of the content, then you may appreciate this novella. I can’t recommend it to you otherwise. It is a prime example of just how little care Goodwin puts into the stories she writes.
Thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now premiering over in Tales of the Five Worlds!
Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.
To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?
Chapters 1 through 5 are is now available! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.
