Robin of Sherwood - Softcover

Michael Morpurgo is a respected and popular writer for children with more than sixty books to his name. He has also written several screenplays. Michael has won numerous awards world-wide including The Whitbread, The Smarties Prize and The Children's Book of the Year Award. Michael Foreman is one of the most acclaimed children's illustrators today. His own books War Boy and War Games won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Smarties Prize.

Grade 4-8. The remarkable team that produced Arthur: High King of Britain (Harcourt, 1995) has taken on Robin Hood. Again, the catalyst is a modern 12-year-old boy. Finding Robin's skull in the heart of a storm-felled tree, the child faints and dreams of Robin, who, in turn, dreams of the boy. Using legend only as a frame, Morpurgo gives readers classic tragedy, complete with a seemingly invincible hero afflicted with hubris. When the sheriff's men capture and blind his father, Robin escapes to join the Outcasts in Sherwood. Among the author's inventions: the outlaws are disabled; Marion is a pink-eyed albino, an outlaw before Robin. Neither Robin nor Marion is well-born; Earl of Locksley is an alias. Robin and Marion have a son. Will Scarlet is a hunchbacked old man. Little John dunks Much and Tuck, not Robin. The outlaws ransom Richard, who is not Howard Pyle's "good King Richard of the Lion's Heart," (The Merry Adventure of Robin Hood [Dover, 1968]) but history's Richard, an adventurer who cared for crusades but not for England. The story races inexorably toward Robin's fate, propelled by a lesson on the evils of publicity. Wildly talented Foreman's predominantly full-page watercolors are verdant, tangibly real with his touch of impressionism and shimmering with life. Margaret Early's Robin Hood (Abrams, 1996) sticks with the legend and her art is magnificent, but Robin of Sherwood will attract and thrill more kids.?Helen Gregory, Grosse Pointe Public Library,
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