"Robin: Lady of Legend" is an entertaining, textually well-crafted novel unfortunately undermined by weaknesses in narration and other literary elements. To begin with, the narration spends most of the time in third-person limited but there are sudden, frequent shifts to third-person omniscient that bump the reader out of the flow, as in the following example:
"Ducking into an alleyway, Robin pulled out a dress from her waist sack and donned her woman's disguise, too intent on her mission to register the irony that she now thought of women's garb as the guise, and not men's. If she had considered it, the thought would have disturbed her, but all her attention was focused on Nottingham Castle." Highlight Location (2205-9)
The narration also sometimes jumps between characters in the same scene, as when Robin meets Little John; this is especially distracting when Robin thinks of herself as "she" and then in the next paragraph another character thinks of her as "he." This is going to be an issue in any novel dealing with concealed gender roles, but it can be managed - Scott Westerfeld, for example, handles it with particular deftness in his "Leviathan" series, and with a little work it could have been handled better here.
The narration and interspersed use of song are both faithful imitations of those in Howard Pyle's classic version. However, their use here serves to mimic rather than evoke - there aren't any new insights gained from their inclusion. This is the equivalent of remaking a classic Hollywood film by just reshooting it shot for shot. It might have been more effective to evoke Pyle's writing style as a nod to earlier works, and then to update it for modern readers. For example, keep the same writing style but shorten the sentence length during action or comedy scenes, as these in particular seem a bit slow. Or use Pyle's flowery prose as a contrast to describe a bloody battle scene.
There's also a noticeable lack of character arcs, which means plot elements are strung together like individual episodes but there is little overall cohesion. Robin herself does not appear to change much throughout the novel; there are references at the beginning to her behavior being "selfish" and toward the end there are mentions of her accepting her leadership role and caring for others, but we are told this rather than allowed to watch her develop over the course of the story. Her adventures in Sherwood are related with an engaging sense of fun and whimsy, but without a character arc to underpin them the novel as a whole wavers in its sense of purpose.
Perhaps the biggest issue with the novel is its lack of depth. There's little weaving of plot, symbolism and other literary elements to create a rich tapestry of a novel - there's only one thread here (the plot), and everything takes places on the surface. Interestingly, this seems to be common to authors with a strong STEM background; Naomi Novik does it, and to an extent so does Neal Stephenson. There is some symbolism, as in the references to a red hart in the forest that no one can catch, but this is spliced in rather than woven seamlessly into the story fabric; in the second reference to the red hart the author explicitly states that the hart represents Robin's sense of freedom, instead of trusting to her readers' perspicacity and leaving that in the background for them to find. The main issue is that these elements are logically sequential but are all hit with exactly the same force, which is distracting with the use of such a rich writing style - it's like expecting to see the London Symphony Orchestra and instead watching a talented soloist play bass guitar (edited because I'm not a great writer and I never liked how I originally phrased that). Regardless of how good the soloist is (and there should be no question, the author really can write), there is still only one stream of music instead of many interweaving melodies. Relying predominantly on plot rather than incorporating multiple literary elements means the novel begins to buckle under the weight of such ornate prose.
In spite of this, ArceJaeger is a more than capable author, and I was more satisfied spending $2.99 on this than I was spending upwards of $10 on other Robin Hood novels. Unlike many professional authors she shows a solid understanding of the main elements of story construction, even if her execution is bit imperfect, and she has an obvious passion for her subject. The novel could have used some professional editing assistance, true, but for a self-published work it's not bad, and I look forward to seeing if the author continues this story in a sequel.
