The release of Russell Crowe's Robin Hood movie sparked my interest in clearing this book from my backlog. Allegedly, this 1883 novel is the "definitive" classic Robin Hood tale. I'm calling bullshit - nowhere in the entire book is the all-important Maid Marian featured. For twenty-two long chapters, then, Robin Hood and his band of merry men simply run around making mischief. The book is also written in a very old style of English; characters are constantly using "thee" and "thy" when they speak and adding that mysterious "-eth" suffix to their verbs. By Chapter 6 or so, I was just getting pretty bored reading about Robin Hood and strangers getting into quarterstaff fights and "thwacking" each other's heads and ribs with their cudgels. In addition to the absence of Maid Marian - the only thing keeping Robin Hood from seeming like a total homosexual in most renditions of the tale - there's no Prince John arc either. Instead, it's just the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire getting all flustered by Robin and his band of "sevenscore gay and merry men." (Sausagefest? You betcha.) Another thing that bothered me about the book was its deceptive length. My particular copy comes in at just 140 pages, but the pages are so large and the font so small that, normalized, I think the book was really something like 400 pages. Not exceptionally long, by any means, but much longer than the novella I thought I was in for. Wikipedia even has the length of the first edition of the book at over 900 pages. So, yeah - it ain't your average 140-pager. But it's done now. I can't really recommend the book to anyone; it wasn't terrible, but the episodic nature of it got very stale and didn't really lead anywhere. Stick with the movie. Specifically, the one with the cartoon fox.
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