Review: The Ghosts of Sherwood

The Ghosts of Sherwood by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went through a series of feelings about this book.

The first was anticipation. I've been a long-time fan of the author, since the early Kitty Norville books, loved the Golden Age supers novels, and have been impressed by her short fiction. Recently, I enjoyed a side novel in the Kitty Norville series, made up of several shorter pieces (a "fixup"). While Robin Hood is pretty well-trodden ground, I felt confident that Carrie Vaughn was up to the task of making it fresh and giving it a new angle, lifting it above the tropes of the often-told story.

So the next emotion I experienced was slight disappointment, when I first saw that this was a novella (less than 20,000 words), and then, as I began to read, found that it unfolded at first as a linear story such as I've often seen written by new professional writers: competent, certainly, but not promising to rock my world. Fairly ordinary Robin Hood fanfic, I felt, without any fantasy elements or new twists; just "here is Robin as a middle-aged family man, after Prince John has legitimately ascended to the throne, and here are his kids, and here is the political situation, and now we will have a crisis."

But by the end, I had been drawn into the plight of the children, and was thoroughly ready for a tension-filled escape/rescue, and felt the family's emotion around it. So even though this is quite a straightforward story, and (like many novellas) it feels like it wants to be longer, and it leaves a lot at the end not fully resolved, on the whole I enjoyed it, and felt it was done with the skill I've come to expect from this author.

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