Well, nuts. I'm really disappointed by this book. It started out promisingly, with interesting characters, great historical detail, and some original takes on various characters from the Robin Hood legend. It begins with Alan Dale joining Robin Hood's band as a young teen, and at first I thought it was going to be a YA book. But things got adult pretty quickly. And the truth is, I will read a book with bad language in it, and I'll read a book with violence in it. I will even read books where characters have sex, as long as the sex isn't described in explicit, salacious detail. Sadly, this was too explicit for me to read in good conscience. I skimmed through the first objectionable scene and kept reading, hoping that would be the end of such stuff, but eventually I realized it wasn't, so I had to stop.
And I'm so disappointed that the author chose to include all that smut, because I was very invested in the characters and intrigued by the plot, and now I'll never get to find out how Donald resolved everything. Boo.
The good news is, I don't have this taking up space on my shelves anymore!
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R. Explicit sex, very bad language, torture, violence, and pagan rituals. I absolutely do not recommend this book.
Rarely do I stop reading a book halfway through. I usually either quit after a couple of chapters because it just doesn't appeal to me for whatever reason, or else I finish the book. But today, I quit reading this book. Right in the middle of a short story, in fact.
Why?
Because the stories were following an alarming trend. Bad things kept happening. And then worse things. People died, people were mistreated, children died, children were mistreated... it was horribly depressing! And each story seemed to get darker and sadder. So I quit. Because the last two books I read were sad and dark, and I was hoping that this would be an antidote for the gloom left in my imagination by the previous books. But instead, it deepened the gloom. So I'm giving it up in favor of a nice, cheerful murder mystery.
The trouble is, these stories are quite well written. The characters are believable and relatable, especially the titular heroine of "Lois the Witch." And then all manner of horrid things befall these nice people, and I kept getting sadder and sadder. Sometimes I'm in the mood for sad. But this is not that time.
Kara of Flowers of Quiet Happiness did a post today asking her readers if they are "moody readers." And I am. If I'm not in the mood for a book, I don't enjoy it much. So I'll usually set it aside for another time. Because this is a library book, I'll just return it, and try another of Elizabeth Gaskell's books some other time. If you have any recommendations, I'd love to hear them, as this is the first thing of hers I've read.
I got about 120 pages into this book, then realized that for three days running, I'd chosen to read Potty Training in Less Than a Day rather than Faulkner because the potty training book was more interesting. So I quit reading Faulkner. Because I have very little time to read right now, and I'm not going to waste it on something I'm not enjoying or learning from.
I'm not a big fan of stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf gives me a headache. This didn't quite go that far, as it's not entirely stream-of-consciousness... but it's also told all out of order, which also annoys me. Sometimes it can work to tell a story in circles -- think Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- and sometimes it seems to serve no purpose other than to try to show how clever the author is to tell a story in a non-conventional way.
Yes, Faulkner is an Important Writer. Yes, I've read some of his short stories and liked them. Yes, his books are Modern Classics. But I simply didn't like this book.
(Originally posted on The Huggermugger Blog on Jun. 29, 2009.)
