My last forelay into the War of the Roses period did not fare all that well. But never saying never, I'm back at it again with a new story set in England during that civil war. Along with that, I have also come across an unknown sequel to a very famous book. Does unknown mean "bad"? Find out below.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Black Arrow by Robert Lewis Stevenson C
This is indeed an old fashioned adventure story. It's young protagonist Dick Sheldon, goes from one mostly disastrous adventure to the next from the beginning to the end of the story. Through his adventures and misadventures he does things that he comes to regret but grows up.
I can only give this story an average, "C" grade for several reasons. First is the language. Stevenson tells the story using archaic language. Now when modern usages appear in fantasy or historical fiction they annoy me, but I found that the language Stevenson used to tell this story was just too authentic. It wasn't that I couldn't figure out what was going on, though in dialog it was sometimes very hard to follow. One of my chief joys in reading is the clever use of language, however, I found that the archaic language often needed to be deciphered. This made reading more work than pleasure.
The other factor that lowered my enjoyment of the story was that a lack of knowledge of the historical period. Knowledge of this age where alliances shifted with every triumph or disaster experienced by the two factions contending for the throne of England, and in this shifting landscape would have been helpful in knowing what exactly is going on. Not being up to speed on this period of history, I quickly lost track of who was for whom. Plus the pace of the story was pretty hectic and almost nothing turns out right until the very end. Which might not be a bad thing for many readers, but I guess I found it a little too fast paced.
To sum The Black Arrow up, I would say it was a classic adventure story, perhaps over-stuffed with adventure. And archaic language.
Catriona (AKA David Balfour) by Robert Lewis Stevenson DNF 8%
This story starts right where RLS's Kidnapped ends. I read that story in 2023. I was looking back of my review of that book and I noted in my review that it had a very strange and abrupt ending. Indeed, I had to look up an online version to make certain that the book I was reading wasn't missing a page. Apparently it wasn't it was missing just a page, it was missing the last half of the rest of the story. Kidnapped earned only a "C" grade from me. I was still confused by the start of this story, and given my lukewarm impression of the first half of the story, and from what I read about what this story was about, I decided not to press on.
(I'll be honest; when I came across this book, for some reason, I had it in my mind that it was the sequel to Treasure Island, which is why I picked it up. If I had my wits about me, I likely wouldn't have bothered.)
Looking back over the RLS I have read, I don't think that RLS stories are exactly to my taste. At least in fiction. I liked his A Child's Garden of Verses though. I do have a very fragile 1906 copy of his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, and An Inland Voyage that maybe I should give a try.
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