The Forest Queen

I don't know what this is beside such a disappointment because I like Cornwell's books - so I don't know what happened to this book. It was dark and dreary and just generally so unrelievedly depressing with characters that I just wanted to reach my hands around the necks of and squeeze and claw their faces and oh my gosh, I don't think I've hated characters this badly in a very, very long time.

(Except Alana Dale. She's such a minor, unimportant character, but at least she is fun. ... No one else is fun.)

Silvie: I don't know what I'm doing. I'm useless.
Bird: Silvie, you don't know what you're doing. You're useless.
Silvie: I know more than you, though, Bird.
Bird: sigh No, Silvie, you really don't.
(Pretty much every conversation between these two, ever.)

Okay, let's just say I hate Silvie, she's arrogant when she shouldn't be and insecure when she shouldn't be and is one of the most obnoxious YA female protagonists ever. (Shrill and sharp. She's also quite determined that love means giving up freedom, which, I think, is a terrible message, as you shouldn't choose to be with someone that would make you give up your freedom.) Bird (and I truly hate his nickname) is condescending. I hate both of them separately as characters and I really, really hate them as love interests.

Besides the characters, the book loads us up on rape, graphic animal death, attempted suicide, implied incestuous feelings, abuse, ect. It's like let's just makes things as crappy as possible and I dislike that to begin with, but I've been dealing with so much media that seems to think everything has to be as crappy as possible that I just don't want to deal with any of it anymore.

The dichotomy between the gritty, graphic subject matter and Cornwell's somewhat lyrical writing is especially jarring.

The idea of a gender switched Robin Hood is interesting enough but, minus the names of a few people/places, you wouldn't even guess that this was a Robin Hood retelling because there is nothing of Robin in Silvie.

Also, the author was quite adamant that her reason for not including a Maid Marian character in the story is because she didn't exist in the earliest tellings. So, instead we get Bird - who, as far as I can tell, has absolutely no correlation to the tale and is invented whole cloth. Yay.

And on the note of the original tale... Where's the thieving? I mean, Silvie pretty much only steals from her own family - and that only after being convinced that she's only taking what she'd be eating if she still lived there, anyway. And the big, bad Sheriff? The only reason Silvie even is interested in fighting against him is because he's her brother. If he'd been anyone else, she wouldn't care.

(Side note: I've shelved this book as ‘adult' on my spreadsheet, because if I had read it as a teen, with all the trigger warnings that I feel it should have, plus what I feel is a very graphic birth scene, I would have been mentally scared by it. So, yeah, YMMV.)