Fans of Dorothy Must Die will love this reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood. Girl power rules supreme when a modern girl finds herself in the middle of a medieval mess with only her smart mouth and her Olympic-archer aim to get her home.
Ellie Hudson is the front-runner on the road to gold for the U.S. Olympic archery team. All she has to do is qualify at the trials in jolly old England. When Ellie makes some kind of crazy wrong turn in the caverns under Nottingham Castle—yes, that Nottingham—she ends up in medieval England.
Ellie doesn’t care how she got to the Middle Ages; she just wants to go home before she gets the plague. But people are suffering in Nottingham, and Ellie has the skills to make it better. What’s an ace archer to do while she’s stuck in Sherwood Forest but make like Robin Hood?
Pulled into a past life as an outlaw, Ellie feels her present fading away next to daring do-gooding and a devilishly handsome knight. Only, Ellie is on the brink of rewriting history, and when she picks up her bow and arrow, her next shot could save her past—or doom civilization’s future.
Source: GoodReads
I picked up this book, despite its hideous cover because the author has written some of my favorite books (under a different name-Rosemary Clement Moore). I didn’t particularly like No Good Deed though. While there were occasional glimpses of the wit that I loved in the author’s other novels, it was overall a very meh book for me.
It probably didn’t help that I kept comparing it to all of those medieval Disney movies of the week that aired back in the 90’s.
Seriously, what was it? Did Disney like get a good idea on sets and medieval themed costumes?
Regardless, you can’t deny that they tried to style the MC to look like Kiera Knightly on Princess of Thieves. Which actually came out in 2001, not the late 90’s but whatever. It’s odd that they decided to style the book as such since the Ellie in my head looked fairly androgynous.
After all, she’s mistaken for male for a good chunk of the novel without even trying to hide her gender at the beginning of the book-she’s wearing a sweater and relatively form fitting jeans. The chick whose posing on the cover, wouldn’t be mistaken as a guy. And it is mentioned that Ellie has enough of a chest to later have to masker a makeshift sports bra so…maybe they thought her version of Robin Hood had moobs?
But digressing…
But seriously, I think it’s one of the worst covers I’ve seen this year.
But this book isn’t about dissecting book covers (well, most of the time). It’s about talking about the contents of the book and I’m afraid there’s not much to say. At the beginning of the story, there seemed to be some interesting storylines-Ellie clearly had issues with her father, her brother was missing, and she somehow travels in time.
Seriously, the time travel itself is never explained it just randomly happens. ’cause you know, time travel just randomly happens.
I honestly, even wondered why she traveled in time because she kept saying how she wasn’t going to change history.
Trope Rant Time: Why the fuck have a time travel book, if you’re not going to change history. I’m sorry, I know that some good time traveling adventures where they avoid changing the past (Back to the Future) BUT it just seems like it’s become an unnecessary cliche.
I mean seriously, you traveled through time. You’re going to change history just by freaking being there. Besides, how do you know that the history you live in is the right one. Like, for instance, if I could go back in time before say the election from hell of last year I would be changing history you can bet you ass so that we wouldn’t have the Russian-phile orange doofus in office and the US wouldn’t currently be the laughing stock of the world right now.
I digress though…it’s just one of those annoying trope that I’ll never get used to. And in this book, when the character is like, “I can’t change history.”
I’m like, well, you are by pretending to be freaking Robin Hood, dearie. I mean, think about it.
Anyway, I’ll never get used to that trope especially since the whole point in freaking time travel is to fuck things about. But I seriously, don’t think much was changed. Pretty much the only thing that was changed was the character’s clothes at the end.
I wouldn’t say the book was a complete loss though, not if you liked history. There was some nice use of historical detail here and there. I can tell that Connolly researched the novel. But that’s not really that much of a surprise concerning her other books. However, and I can’t stress this enough, if you are going to write a book about medieval England be aware that they did not speak modern English.
Modern English did not exist until Shakespeare’s day. While Connolly acknowledges that it’s difficult for the characters to understand Ellie (but ultimately they do end up understanding her) it should be next for impossible for them to understand her. Don’t believe me, take a semester of early Brit Lit and then we’ll talk.
After reading Chaucer and all that shit (which by the way was written about a hundred and fifty or so years after this book took place give or take a few decades) I can tell you that I’d have a hard time speaking that shit even then.
What bothered me more though was the the lack of characterization.
It was just pathetic. I could care less about these characters as the book progressed. There’s one guy that I sort of think was suppose to be a love interest, but things never really developed that far and at the end we just sort of have the future look alike trope which I absolutely despise.
Trope Rant: Just because there’s a guy in the future that looks eerily similar to a past love interest does NOT mean that they are the same person. Ever heard of identical twins, authors. Thought so, considering everyone and their mother uses the evil twin trope. But I guess a thousand years of time travel doesn’t mean that genetics randomly made a person look alike a long ago dead relative. No, it means they must share the same soul especially if they share the same name…
And honestly, this trope wouldn’t have bothered me as much if there was an actual relationship. But there wasn’t a relationship. There was just a hint of one, and it was so small you had to literally do a squint bend and snap to see it. In this case, I feel like it would’ve been better for the novel to go sans romance all together.
The other characters were merely there to serve a purpose to the plot. I hate to say this, but when I read this book, I actually was thinking that Scarlet did a better job at telling the Robin Hood story, and we all know I had issues with that series. But no, this book made me want to pick up that series again just because you know even though the characterization sucked, the characters actually served more than means to an end.
Really, the only character who had any development at all was Queen Eleanor (and FYI, YA authors I wouldn’t mind a retelling of a young Eleanor story she is bad ass on multiple levels even though her kids and husband ended up kind of sucking).
It pains me to say that I can’t recommend this one. I love the author’s other books (in fact, I am tempted to do a reread of some of her stuff soon), but this book doesn’t work for me. Had it spent more time developing the characters actually explaining why the character went back in time and exploring her life with the characters a bit more, I might’ve cared for it more. As it stood though, it could’ve very easily been the blah Disney movie of the week.
Overall Review: A C. It’s not horrible, per say, but I hardly recommend it. At best it is average.
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