Robin Hood has never loomed very large in my personal pantheon. Sure, I like stories about charming bandits and stealing from the rich as much as the next guy, but no more than the next guy either. Given the choice, I’d usually choose something else.
The Ghosts of Sherwood has made me reconsider my (non-)stance on the Prince of Thieves, however. Carrie Vaughn has written a marvellously compelling continuation of the Robin Hood story, set well into Robin and Marian’s middle age, when they have children to raise and compromises to make. Their children, Mary, John, and Elanor, likewise have their work cut out for them, but theirs is to live up to their parents’ reputations. It’s as happily ever after as can be managed in a more realistic world, with ageing heroes, old feuds, and new, uneasy peace with the new, uneasy King John.
The Ghosts of Sherwood is located in time but also timeless, just close enough to that ageless mythic core to get some of its magic. Robin and Marian and the rest are just slightly bigger than life, which works well for the dramatic sequences and also plays well with the experiences of the children. After all, everyone’s parents are heroes when they’re younger. John still believes it; Mary, older and full of questions, isn’t as certain. Navigating that transition between childhood and adulthood is all the more poignant for Mary as she reckons with parents who actually are heroes, but who are still mortal and fallible.
Her journey is brief but intense, full of action, and suspense. On its own, it’s perfectly able to hold its own against any other YA adventure, but Vaughn runs Marian’s narrative in contrast to Mary’s, adding depth of perspective and tension. Mother and daughter share a realistic outlook but also a dauntless spirit, and are eager to protect those they love. Mary soon gets to learn firsthand about how her parents’ escapades truly felt, but Marian, an old hand at adventuring, must now experience them as an outsider, full of fear and doubt.
It’s a great idea to contrast Marian and Mary, and it was an additional brilliant move to focus so much on the setting of Sherwood Forest, which is almost a character itself. Master rogues like Robin are common in modern SFF, and generic swashbucklers won’t cut it anymore, just as generic “medieval” Western European fantasy settings are played out. Particularity is so critical these days, and Vaughn gives that to us. Locksley feels inhabited by real people, and Sherwood feels suitably uninhabited, ghostly but not frighteningly so. It’s immediately treated as Mary’s haven and romping ground, and so her suspicions about it being haunted give it a sense of complex history rather than horror-movie menace.
Former audiences would have been awed by Robin’s mastery of the longbow and his brazen defiance of authority rather than his woodcraft. But now that every D&D setting and fantasy series has an archer and a high-charisma character, us jaded city-dwellers are more inclined to be impressed by the woodcraft and the politics. How do you operate in the woods? And how do you keep a long-term peace once the work of wealth redistribution is (forcibly) done? Vaughn blends these newer questions with the legends so well that I almost missed how masterful a pivot it was.
I’m very excited to read the next instalment, The Heirs of Locksley, out in August 2020. Also, thank you to Vaughn and to Tor.com’s marketing team who chose not to call anything in this series “Robin’s Daughter” or “The Archer’s Daughter” or something else with “daughter” in the title like a billion other books out there. I hate that overused trend and I hope it dies. But moving on—this is a book that is about father and mothers, daughters and sons, but also about individuals with their own skills who use those skills for the good of others.
The Ghosts of Sherwood is a thrilling little book, and one I can’t wait to give to a surprisingly wide array of readers. Fans of classic fantasy, fans of swashbuckling, fans of YA…there’s a little something of everything for readers in this book.
The Ghosts of Sherwood is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of June 9th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Carrie Vaughn’s The Ghosts of Sherwood revisits the Robin Hood legend with a story of the famed archer’s children.
Everything about Father is stories.
Robin of Locksley and his one true love, Marian, are married. It has been close on two decades since they beat the Sheriff of Nottingham with the help of a diverse band of talented friends. King John is now on the throne, and Robin has sworn fealty in order to further protect not just his family, but those of the lords and barons who look up to him – and, by extension, the villagers they protect.
There is a truce. An uneasy one, to be sure, but a truce, nonetheless.
But when the Locksley children are stolen away by persons unknown, Robin and Marian are going to need the help of everyone they’ve ever known, perhaps even the ghosts that are said to reside deep within Sherwood.
And the Locksley children, despite appearances to the contrary, are not without tricks of their own…
