Scarlet, by A.C. Gaughen
When my daughter was three, she was swept up in the legend of Robin Hood.
She dressed up in green and shot imaginary arrows all through the house. She thought nothing of playing a “boy” character.
By the time she was four, she’d learned enough from the kids at pre-school that the only place in the Robin Hood story for girls, was as Maid Marion: waiting.
But our new heroine, by A.C. Gaughen, is named Scarlet, and she is waiting for no one. She's on the run from the malevolent Lord Gisbourne and has joined Robin Hood's Merry Men as a boy. Nobody but Robin and Big John knows her secret.
Scarlet can take care of herself. “Rob and John shot daggers at each other. With their eyes, leastways. I’m the only one who shoots real daggers.”
But that doesn’t preclude some tantalizing romantic tension between her and Robin, “'I’ll keep your heart, Scar,' he whispered. 'If you keep mine.'”
Action, romance, and gender-bending in medieval England; Scarlet is satisfying in every way.
Narrated by the honey-voiced Helen Stern, a veteran romance and erotica reader, she brings just the right amount of swagger and vulnerability to our heroine.
--Willow Pennell