A tried-and-true heroic tale made fresh with novelty and well-researched details.
This epic fantasy retelling of a classic story delivers characters both new and familiar.
Danley’s (A Spirited Manor, 2018, etc.) tale has a mythic bent from the beginning, as the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham murders Robin Hood’s father and burns their family farm to the ground. This episode invokes the idea of the monomyth (and a call to action, especially for the farm boy). From there, the story hits familiar beats but keeps them fresh with information from folktales and oral traditions apparently pre-dating the Robin Hood mythos of modern popular culture. Exiled, Robin escapes to Sherwood Forest, where he meets Little John (fleeing the sheriff’s service). The two become friends and join forces with others, adopting a moral code even as they turn to highway robbery to survive. Interestingly, this code is less contingent on their targets’ wealth than their honesty, as Robin and his companions visit justice on only those who lie when asked if they have money. Rather than resorting to violent acts, they have a strict rule against killing and, in fact, invite some weary travelers to join them in their feasts. Further, Robin renounces Christianity early in the story, seeing clergymen as another aspect of the corrupt state, preying on the downtrodden and coveting riches beyond their needs. This stance—as well as the fact that Robin is neither a nobleman nor a loyalist to an absent king, as in some adaptations—sets Danley’s protagonist apart from the simplicity of the morality plays the character often stars in and introduces pagan religion and a philosophy akin to political anarchism, with its strong opposition to unjust hierarchies. Some readers may find that these elements fail to breathe new life into the tale’s well-trod ground, especially as the plot proceeds. Robin (now beloved by the poor) is pitted against an increasingly irate sheriff, forcing the hero to use only his wits and skills to save his friend and lady love. The bones of the narrative are familiar (Little John says of Robin: “He gets one taste of treating folks with kindness, and it is like a thirst that is never quenched”). But the classic story endures for a reason, and many readers will likely find themselves intrigued and entertained by the novel’s rich prose, intense action, historical and mythological depth, and captivating innovations.
A tried-and-true heroic tale made fresh with novelty and well-researched details.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72384-312-9
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
