Arrows Fletched with Peacock Feathers, by Claudia Quint
Publisher: Less Than Three Press
Release Date: March 1, 2017

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Notthingham suffers under the ruthless enforcement of the Sheriff, who is determined to live up to his title and forget the difficult childhood that left him orphaned and destitute.

Then a charismatic bandit named Robin Hood crashes through his bedroom window and leaves the Sheriff’s ordered world thoroughly shattered—and threatens to steal the Sheriff’s not so hardened heart.

Poly Relationship
Gay Characters
Bisexual Characters
Genderqueer Characters
Fantasy
Fairy Tale Retelling
Short Story

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while now, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled to get my hot little hands on it.

This is a story that basically helps you understand and sympathise with the Sheriff of Nottingham, and it manages it brilliantly. I think one of the only thing I would have liked further to his character would have to be to have gotten a name beyond ‘Sheriff’ for the character 🙂

But in all seriousness, I followed the story seamlessly. Sheriff was incredibly poor when he was young, and was a bit of a cut purse like Robin Hood is now. Thus, he sympathises with the character that he’s meant to be arresting. That was a really cool new dynamic to the story. Unfortunately, he didn’t end up fighting for them against what the (also unnamed) Abbot wanted. To me, for all his good intent, he seemed a little bit like a puppet to the Abbot.

Because of that, I found it a little bit hard to swallow that both Robin Hood and Maid Marion were interested in him romantically. This was hurt by the fact that, in a story as short as this one, there wasn’t really room to go into the motivations behind Robin or Marion’s actions. We could see what they were doing, and that basically had to be enough.

Also a problem with the length of the story was that the fight between Sheriff and Guy at the end read to me like the close of the second act. I would have loved to see a third act in which Sheriff rode into the sunset with Robin and Marion, and tried to deal with the actions that he’d committed during his time as Sheriff of Nottingham. As the story ended before that, it lessened the feeling of high stakes that could have been really nuanced in this story had it been longer.

Still, a fun reading of an old favourite.

Claudia Quint writes fantasy, romance, and erotica primarily exploring fairy tales and myth,when she isn’t brewing wine, taking care of her society finches, and messing about in her garden. Her work has been published with Timeless Tales, Transmundane Press, and 18th Wall Productions. She is currently at work on a fantasy novel, Diary of a Centaur. Keep up with her at claudiaquint.wordpress.com.

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I received an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.