Age Level: 10 and up | Grade Level: 4 and up | Series: Rowan Hood
Rosemary has nowhere to go when her beloved mother dies. She has never met her father-the outlaw Robin Hood-and she's grown up among the woodland creatures her mother loved. So she decides to change her name to Rowan, disguise herself as a boy, and undertake a perilous journey through Sherwood Forest, in search of Robin Hood. But how will she find him? And will he offer her a home?
"This tale is a charmer, filled with exciting action, plenty of humor, engaging characters, and a nice fantasy twist." (Booklist, starred review)
"Rowan Hood reads like the first in a series, and teens are sure to hope that it will be just that, leading to many more." (VOYA)
Hurray for Rowan Hood, the girls' answer to swashbuckling Robin Hood! Rowan, a.k.a. Rosemary, is forced to disappear into the woods disguised as a boy after her mother, a woodwife with healing powers, is murdered by the local lord's henchmen. Ro's only option, other than "toiling in some lord's cabbage patch," is to find her fabled father, Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest. Along the way, this outlaw-in-training is joined by a motley crew of characters: a wolf-dog that catches arrows midflight, a giant of a boy with a spellbinding musical talent, and a runaway princess. Rowan finds Robin Hood and his merry men, but she soon discovers her troubles have only just begun.
Packed with magic, valiant warriors, nasty villains, and edge-of-your-seat adventure, this story is also a poignant search for identity and family. Rowan is a fierce female protagonist with a good head on her shoulders. Girls and boys of all ages would be proud to name her as their heroine. Award-winning author Nancy Springer (I Am Mordred: A Tale from Camelot and many others) tells a riveting tale. (Ages 11 and older) --Emilie Coulter--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-7-This recording of Nancy Springer's novel, Rowan Hood: Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest (Philomel, 2001) is read by actress Emily Gray. Rowan is actually Rosemary, a 13-year-old who disguises herself as a boy and goes into hiding when her mother, the woodwife Celandine, is murdered. Ro has never met her father, Robin Hood, nor her mother's people, the aelfe, or old ones. But in this lively adventure, she finds Robin, saves him from certain death, reveals herself to him, and makes a connection with the aelfe. In the process, she creates her own band of outlaws: a wolf-dog, a foolish but well-meaning minstrel boy, and a runaway princess. Gray reads the story well, with just the right amount of expression and variation among the characters' voices. She even sings the minstrel's songs in a clear, simple voice. Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, Morgan Hill, CA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist." I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the "melting pot" because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.
My "conform" phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college -- Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. it was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and "happenings." Instead, I married a preacher's son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer's wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.
Here beginneth the "go crazy" phase.
Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear "voices" in my head. First they whispered "divorce" (not permissible), and later they hissed "suicide". They scared me silly. I couldn't sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish "The White Hart" and "The Silver Sun"--yet not one of the doctors of shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on "helping" poor little me "adjust" to being a housewife, mother, and pastor's wife.
Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage--or desperation--to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.
"I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing," I said to my husband.
"Fine," he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.
Conform, go crazy--or become an artist.
By becoming a writer--by becoming who I truly was--I became well.
It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In "The Black Beast, The Golden Swan" and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In "Chains of Gold" and "The Hex Witch of Seldom" I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children's books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in "Apocalypse"--whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn't thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor's wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. "Larque on the Wing"--whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I'd never dreamed were in me.
It's been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing "Fair Peril"--a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband's infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I've ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all to similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn't go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.
Now married to a rather remarkable second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband's hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a real house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Life is an adventure and I mean that sincerely.
I thoroughly enjoyed the last two outings for YA by Nancy Springer, both Arthurian tales that added a dark and tragic tinge to famed but 2-D characters. "Rowan Hood," a tale of Robin Hood's daughter in Sherwood Forest, doesn't really make me go "wow!" Maybe my expectations were too high.
Thirteen-year-old Rosemary lives with her woodwife mother Celandine (who is also part aelfe) in the forest -- until one day when the lord's horsemen ride in and burn the cottage -- and Celandine with it. Rosemary is left alone and with two options: Live in the woods and be killed eventually by the lord's men, or go to the village and be parceled off to a husband. She chooses the third option: Go off into the woods to find her father, the famed Robin Hood.
Rosemary disguises herself as a boy and heads off. Before long she encounters the mystical aelfe, a gentle giant with a gift for beautiful music, a princess running from an arrange marriage, and a wolf-dog who becomes her steadfast friend. And soon she finds that Robin Hood himself is in danger -- can she help?
Nancy Springer's use of atmosphere and mystical surroundings is as good as ever; she becomes a little less descriptive in ordinary surroundings. The actual plot is a strained idea in itself; and the product feels very bland and bloodless. It focuses less on characterization and more on the heroes dashing from one place to the next.
One of the problems is that I didn't find Rosemary particularly compelling as a heroine. Heroes like her are a dime a dozen in fantasy, and there are really no thoughts or responses from her that make her in any way interesting. The idea of a gentle giant is hardly new, but given a good twist by making him a master minstrel. The only problem arises when Springer overemphasizes his immaturity, such as whacking a knight on the head and saying "Meanie." Ettarde is the worst character in the book, who seems to think constantly about how her father tried to marry her off and who doesn't have enough pizzazz. Robin and his band are pretty cool and believable, making me wish that Springer had written a book about a woman in THEIR camp instead.
A pleasant little tale, but don't go into it with expectations that are too high.
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When her half-aelfe mother, Celandine, is murdered, thirteen-year-old Rosemary Hood finds that she has no choice but to go find the father she has never known---the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood. Disguising herself as a boy, and taking the name Rowan, she begins her daring journey into Sherwood Forest to track down her father. Soon she enlists the help of a band of followers, including Lionel, the cowardly giant, who has a gift with music, a runaway princess, and a half-wolf, half-dog. Together this strange pairing of people must survive the many perils of Sherwood Forest. However when Rowan gets the news that Robin Hood had been captured, can she gather up her courage to go and save him? Can she live up to her famous name?
I had high expectations for Nancy Springer's book Rowan and many of them were met, though not all. As always Nancy Springer weaves together a great fantasy tale, but somehow Rowan just doesn't pass to me as a heroine. This book is still good and I do recommend people who enjoy fantasy to read it.
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This review is from: Rowan Hood: Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest (Mass Market Paperback)
The tale of Robin Hood just never seems to get old. I would disagree with the posted age suggestion and say ages 7-10. The book is very thin and a quick read without many difficult vocabulary words.
What I enjoyed about this book was its characters. Rowan herself was more adult than child in terms of the way that she thought but was an excellent heroine due to her selflessness and desire to help others. The character of Etty will definitely will some fans as she sheds her princess role and becomes an outlaw girl, one that is one of Rowan's best friends. The only character I was a little surprised at was Robin Hood himself as he seemed to be a little too ignorant and gutsy to have really survived half a day in Nottingham. Regadless, it was an excellent and fun character.
I would say that readers of this book would also like the books by Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley when they are older due to the definite presence of strong female heroines.
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