Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for "The Hero and the Crown" and a Newbery Honor for "The Blue Sword." Her other books include "Sunshine"; the "New York Times" bestseller "Spindle's End"; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," "Beauty and Rose Daughter"; and a retelling of the "Robin Hood" legend, "The Outlaws of Sherwood." She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson.
Gr 9-12 Robin Hood is immortal, but in The Outlaws of Sherwood he doesn't quite come alive. McKinley's novelistic treatment expands the outlines of characters and episodes familiar to readers of Pyle. All is well in the Greenwood until the outlaws open their mouths: their speech and thoughts are a stiff, uneasy mix of ye-olde high seriousness and flip vernacular. McKinley's attempts to evoke the 12th-Century conflict with her wish to raise her characters' political and feminist consciousness do not work. The book moves slowly: there is action, but not enough for the sword-and-sorcery genre addicts; the romance between Robin and Marion hangs fire while he figures out that he can't tell her what to do; the dialogues are sometimes unwieldy and un-yeomanlike; the whole is unconvincing. Pyle's text may be stilted, but there are his wonderful pictures; even Roger Green's version (Penguin, 1984), albeit for a younger audience, has the merit of good pacing. Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle
McKinley brings to the Robin Hood legend a robustly romantic view. She renders it anew by fully developing the background and motive of each member of the merry band, from Robin's ``crime'' that sends him into the woods, to Marian's subterfuge as she straddles the worlds of the nobility and of the outlaws. Their habitations, foresting and thieving is explained, and McKinley, in a thoughtful afterword, reveals both her debt to and her differences with previous versions of the story. There is no reason, however, that readers of those stories might not enjoy this one as well. Although the author does fall into the politics indigenous only to the British isles, she presents a solid piece of tale-weaving, ingenious and ingenuous, causing readers to suspend belief willingly for a rousing good time. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)
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