ROWAN HOOD RETURNS

Rowan, daughter of the woodwife Celandine and Robin Hood, vows to avenge her mother’s death by slaying the four knights who burned her cottage and her within it. With that vow, Rowan finds she can no longer hear the trees and stones, no longer knows, always, where her father is, and the legacy of her mother’s aelfe kin. But she blindly presses forward with her friends, the minstrel Lionel, Ettarde the runaway princess and Beau, whose French malapropisms hide her wily intelligence. This last in the series allows for much description of fey woodland, harsh living and knightly battle in a story that nonetheless moves quickly. When Rowan witnesses what happens to the murderous knights, and the aelves appear to her at a climactic moment, death, revenge, sorrow and devotion culminate in a stirring end. Even though not all of the storylines are fully realized, readers of the earlier titles will be satisfied. (Fiction. 9-12)