Overall, I’d give it an “eh” and recommend it more for its comprehensiveness than its storytelling. It was fun and adventurous and I appreciated seeing the whole Robin Hood story laid out, from the historical context (how those Normans and Saxon’s hated one another!) and the situation of his birth to his eventual and tragic demise.
At the same time, it was certainly competently done and Robin Hood’s character shines through brightly. One the one hand, I didn’t find it written in any way extraordinary or beautiful. There were also plenty of stories that I’d not heard before and little tweeks to the ones I had. Many of the most familiar of these narratives find their way into Green’s version, from Friar Tuck carrying Robin across a river on his shoulders to Little John and Robin’s quarter-staff battle to Robin splitting an opponent’s arrow at a shooting contest. You may be surprised, as I was, to find that the tales of Robin Hood do not stretch back nearly so far as those of say, King Arthur, and we know little about the historicity of the man or the narratives that have come to surround him. In brief, Roger Green has taken all the historical tales of the legend of Robin Hood and rewritten the best bits and pieces into this complete story.
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