Jennifer RobersonRecensioni

3-1/2 stars. Very long, too many men madly pursuing the one woman, and a dreadful Harlequinesque cover that I won't record. Aside from that, a really interesting retelling of the legend and how it got started. It was neat watching all the characters come together. Marion was a bit too independent modern woman, but what the heck, I'm all about willing suspension of disbelief.

Sigh. This book is so dated. It is mired in a kind of second-wave white woman feminist writing where a woman encounters several deeply misogynistic cultures and is constantly being told " a woman with a sword there is no such thing" to which she responds "not only am I a swordswoman, I am the best one." It also doesn't help that these misogynistic cultures are heavily coded to be allegories for non-white peoples and non-white countries trafficking in such orientalist tropes as cannibalism, white slavery (this is actually the crux of the entire plot), polygamy etcetera (and I have to say that this author seems to be particularly guilty of this because even though I enjoy shapechangers! for its pulpy-ness, I do think it is kind of a similarly racist portrayal of indigenous people). I did think that the dynamic between tiger and del is very good because the arc is tiger's and he is allowed to grow out of his misogyny. The problem with every single person being a misogynist is that del's personality gets relegated to constantly telling people that she can do the thing, and it is exhausting. So we don't really get told important things about del by del herself. Instead we have other characters explaining del's backstory. This isn't helped by the fact that this book is entirely Tiger's pov, so we don't really get inner world.

Loved it just as much as back in the day.

Sometimes Tiger was a big, stubborn dumb-dumb, but I still love him.

Sorcerer-painters frolic in a pseudo-Renaissance Italian city-state. The three authors split the book into three sections, and I liked each section about as much as I like each author. The first section felt repetitious and redundant; the second section combined candy-colored central characters with the wonderfully Machiavellian maneuverings of the villainous protagonist; and the third section was good but marred by wrapping up all the threads introduced in the first two sections. All together, it was...eh.

The prose is very effective -- I was quickly engrossed, invested in Marian’s story! But I took months to finish the final third, and nearly DNF, because there are so many unpleasant men who keep getting POV sections. Ugh. If it had just been Robin and Marian, I would have felt quite differently about it.½

I remember enjoying this book when I read it. I read a couple more, enjoying them less along the way. I ended up putting down the third/fourth book without finishing it, I don't do that often, but it started to get a bit bleh.

Very interesting, couldn't put it down, good ending, EXCELLENT character development.

I don't know what happened. I really liked the first two books in this series, and Jennifer Roberson is one of my favorite authors. But I found this third volume boring. And the narrator for this audiobook was not very good. So I gave up on this.

Wishing I had Roberson's imagination! Interesting characters, and the ending was a real page-turner.

A weaving of the fragments of the Robin Hood legend into an entertaining story, with an aspect of female empowerment and PTSD on the survivors of war.

You know what? I give up.

The first section is terrible. It's boring and it is so goddamned repetitive. 300 pages could be condensed to half that.

I got a bit into the second section. Much better written (in that I don't get the same three plot points every twenty pages), but I was still bored.

And I have many other books I could read and hate and be done with in the same amount of time.

To the DNF pile!

Not one of the stronger stories I have read based on Robin Hood. It would have helped if it had been less repetitive, had tighter prose, and if just a dozen less male characters had wanted to bed Maid Marian.

I wanted to love this book, but it just didn't happen. I was bored for the majority of it, and I kept rolling my eyes at Cat (and pretty much the rest of the characters.) The massacre of Glencoe itself is fascinating and tragic, but this novel didn't move me nearly as much as reading accounts of it did. As this is the second book of Jennifer Roberson's that I have read, I have come to realize that her writing style is not to my taste- that doesn't make her a poor author; rather, I simply need to look elsewhere when I turn to historical fiction (particularly when it comes to Scotland or Robin Hood.)

More or less popcorn.

This was unexpectedly lovely, and unexpectedly complex. Not only does it focus on Marian and play the Marian/Robin romance beautifully and hit all the other major episodes from the Robin Hood legend, but also:

the political situation (Richard imprisoned, John making a power grab, etc.) factors strongly into the plot rather than sitting as background to Robin’s adventures
Robin is a former Crusader with PTSD
it tackles sexism head-on without breaking with the medieval setting
the Sheriff is despicable for more than his increased taxation
you get the POVs of pretty much everyone, including the Sheriff, every Merry Man, side characters new to this version, and Robin’s dad.

It’s good medieval fiction in its own right, though I think some of the “known facts” when Roberson was writing have now been debunked, and it uses the cultural awareness of the Robin Hood legend to its advantage—you know X is coming, but not exactly how, and oh gods, that twist made things so much worse, of course it happened that way. I think new headcanons might have been formed.

I would like to thank a friend for recommending this one. She was pretty spot-on with “If you like Outlander, you might also like…”.

8/10

King Richard the Lionheart has died and his brother John is now king. The Sheriff of Nottingham is desperate to be sure he is still employed. Robin Hood and his friends, once pardoned by King Richard, are now outlaws once again, and must hide in Sherwood Forest. The Sheriff is upset with Marian and wants revenge. Robin’s father is not healthy, but the two don’t see eye-to-eye on anything.

I liked this much better than the first one. It took a short bit at the start to get “into” it, but once I did, I really liked this one.

Sword-Dancer is the story of Sandtiger, a famous Southron sword-dancer, who is hired by a Northern woman to guide her through the fierce desert to rescue her brother, a slave in the South. This woman, Delilah, or Del is a sword-singer who is as good as Tiger, and this grates on Tiger's Southron ideas.

A new Jennifer Roberson novel is always a treat, but a new Jennifer Roberson series is a cause for celebration. It should be obvious from my opening sentence that I am a huge fan. I’ve been an avid reader since her debut, Shapechangers (1984, the first “Cheysuli” novel). The way she combines action, ideas, internal struggle, and romance hit just the right notes for me. More importantly, I love how her work has matured and deepened over time. It seems to me that every time she takes a break or begins something new, I see a quantum leap in skill and insight.
Life and Limb, the first volume in her new “Blood and Bone” series, is no exception. She’s begun with a nifty concept: an ex-con biker (Gabriel Harlan) teams up with a clean-cut cowboy (Remi McCue) to fight supernatural nasties and stop the looming apocalypse. And oh yes, they both grew up with a mysterious grandfather, Grandaddy Jubal Horatio Tanner who isn’t human, and neither are they, or not entirely.
In many ways, Life and Limb is the set-up for that conflict, the origin story. Certainly, there’s plenty of action, both internal and external, and a host of adversaries and allies. Grandaddy Jubal has other teams to enlist, so he leaves our heroes in the care of Lily Morrigan (as in “The” Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war, fate and death). Hell’s vents have opened, pouring forth an army of mythological nasties (ghosts, vampires, black dogs, and the like) which now can get infected by demons. Their skills are complementary: Gabe is a crack shooter with guns, but Remi is expert with throwing knives. Gabe has an unerring sense for the rightness (or wrongness) of a place, while Remi’s gift is reading people. And while they’re sniffing out and doing away with demonic presences, the Morrigan tells them, “hell knows you’re here.”
The narrative voice, from Gabe’s first-person perspective, is richly evocative, and the handling of detail, setting and nuance is top-notch, flavored with my favorite cultural references. Therein lies both the book’s strength and its challenge. The heart of the book’s energy, its center, is the emotional and spiritual journey of these two characters. Neither just accepts at face value their angelic nature or their destiny. Much of the story revolves around challenging what they have been told, grappling with how their lives will never the same, figuring out what each means to the other, and along the way making near-fatal mistakes, either from inflated self-confidence or ignorance. They learn by slow steps, often circling around to the same questions before moving on. This is how we humans deal with events and information that changes our entire understanding of the cosmos and our role in it. We question, we negotiate, we accept, then we question some more. Sometimes we have to ask the same questions over and over in different ways until the answers make sense. All the while, these characters get to know one another, overcoming skepticism and distrust. The pacing sometimes feels slow because so much is happening inside and between Gabe and Remi. This isn’t a problem for me since much of the pleasure of reading a character-rich novel is in falling in love with those characters (in other words, it’s a feature, not a bug). However, not all readers are willing to slow down and enjoy the (gorgeous, sexy) scenery, so I suspect readers will either be impatient and bored or, like me, adore this awesome urban fantasy.

Robert of Locksley (later Robin of Locksley, then Robin Hood) has been fighting with King Richard (the Lionheart) in the Crusades. Richard has been imprisoned, but Robert makes his way home. There, he comes across Marian, who he knew when they were younger. Marian is the King’s ward since her father passed away, and the Sheriff hopes to marry her. When Will Scarlet, wanted for murder, kidnaps her, though he doesn’t “defile” her, everyone assumes so, so she is ruined. Doesn’t change that the Sheriff still wants to marry her, but she will have none of it.

It’s a long book. It took 200 of the 800 pages for me to get interested, and even then, that was only when they started bringing in characters I already recognized from the Robin Hood story: Little John, Will Scarlett, “Brother” Tuck. I feel like I shouldn’t have to recognize the story to get interested in it. I also sometimes have a hard time when the same person/character is referred to by different names – last name, first name, title – at different points. It took me way too long to realize that William deLacey and the Sheriff were one and the same! I really did like the last 100 pages. Overall, though, I’m keeping it at an “ok” rating. I already have the sequel, so I will read it at some point.

I feel like this book is very much a sort of afterthought to the Tiger and Del series proper (which it sort of was, I think publishing-wise). It takes place after Tiger and Del have mostly settled into a routine lifestyle; Tiger’s son wants to go on an adventure, so they oblige and have themselves an adventure.

There’s not a whole lot to say about it. Fans of the series will enjoy seeing familiar characters–Tiger and Del are just as fierce as they’ve always been; parenthood hasn’t slowed them down very much. I really liked getting to meet new characters and seeing how people react to Tiger as a legend and an aging, maimed man. If you haven’t read the first six books, I don’t think this would hold very much appeal for you. While the story is fairly solid, not much time is spent on character development and I just don’t think you’ll be able to connect with the characters very well without the background knowledge of the first books. The plot also probably makes much more sense if you have that backstory.

I will say that I don’t remember Tiger being so horribly chauvinistic. He must have been even more so in the earlier books, but I was younger and it didn’t bother me quite so much. This personality trait grated on me at first, but once the story got going it became less frustrating to me; I’m not sure if that’s because I got used to it or because there was less machismo (though it’s probably the former).

Overall, I was happy to have another adventure with the characters, but it’s not necessary to the series as a whole. I’m always game for another Tiger and Del novel, but the series is fine where it stands.

Also posted on Purple People Readers.

I read this way back in the late 90s and found it absolutely fascinating. Hope to reread it some day when there's more time:) Definitely a must for fantasy fans and possibly quite appealing for historical fiction fans too. It has that kind of feel to it.

The Wild Road is book three in the Karavans series and continues the story where it left off in book two. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of progress is made in this book; by the end of book three, the characters are in very similar situations as they were in book two, and most of the problems that I thought were going to be resolved in this book weren’t. It’s made worse by the fact that there’s apparently supposed to be a book four, but it hasn’t been published, and since this book was published in 2012, who knows when/if there will ever be a sequel. I quite liked Karavans and Deepwood (books 1 & 2), but after reading this, I’m retracting my recommendation to start the series and suggesting not starting it, because it’s ends with a lot of things completely unresolved and may likely never be finished.

If book four ever comes out, this would be an okay addition to the series. Not much happens, but there’s a lot of character development going on; we see more of Rhuan’s father and his motivations, and we also learn more about the Deepwood, the demons that live there, and the gods who supposedly control it all. Also, more progress is made on the idea of waging war on the violent people who have overtaken and destroyed the human settlements, causing them to risk traveling near the deepwood to a safer place. Like the second book, this book is grim and dark, but the characters retain their optimism and work to fight for better lives.

Also posted on Purple People Readers.

Deepwood is the sequel to Karavans, and it follows a group of people who were traveling from a dangerous country that’s been taken over by invaders to a safe haven; however, they’re caught in a storm while on their way, and a dangerous magical forest — the deepwood — has decided to move, trapping some of the travelers inside its borders.

I was kind of bored at first; the book starts off following what happens to everyone in the aftermath of the storm, and there’s only so much I can take of characters facing misfortune after misfortune. Near the middle, things start coming together though, and it looks like a solid plot is developing for the third book in the series. I didn’t like Audrun’s story overly much; half of the time, she’s whining about her misfortune, and the other half she’s throwing herself into danger to save her children, even though she doesn’t accomplish anything by it. But, I do like her developing friendship with Rhuan and how he has to change his behavior to accommodate her frustrations.

My favorite parts is what’s going on with Ilona and her diviner powers; she loses them after the storm, and while she has a broken arm that might be affecting them, she is scared of what that might mean for her. I’m interested to see what her role will be in terms of how they deal with the new Deepwood borders. I also really liked the hints of war with the invaders of the country; people are chafing under the invading people’s rule, so it seems like their might be some sort of war or rebellion in the next book.

I really liked the first book; this one is less exciting, but it seems to be building a foundation for a great third book. And, like I said, the beginning was tough for me to get through, but halfway in, it starts picking up. I wouldn’t say this series is a must-read, but it’s certainly a great read if you’re looking for a decent new epic fantasy!

Also posted on Purple People Readers.

3-1/2 stars. Very long, too many men madly pursuing the one woman, and a dreadful Harlequinesque cover that I won't record. Aside from that, a really interesting retelling of the legend and how it got started. It was neat watching all the characters come together. Marion was a bit too independent modern woman, but what the heck, I'm all about willing suspension of disbelief.