Title: Scarlet (Scarlet #1)

Author: A. C. Gaughen

Genre: Young Adult, Fairytales

Published: February 14, 2012

The book is a retelling of Robin Hood from the point of view of a female Will Scarlet.

I was suckered into this book because of the cover. It is really pretty and I really wanted to love this book. I'm not sure if that is what colored my negative reaction or if the book really was just meh.

Things I disliked:

    1. The love triangle. I really am sick of love triangles. In this case it felt like one of the guys was going after the girl because she was a girl and she hadn't slept with him yet. The other guy spent the entire book being fickle about his attitude towards the girl.

    2. Scarlet was really good at fighting. She was amazing as a thief, with knives, martial arts, and the ability to climb. She was raised as a lady the daughter of a lord. Where did she get the skill set put forth within the story? This was never touched on and I don't think I was supposed to find it weird, but I did.

    3. For most of the book I felt as if the story was following a pattern. A: talk to Robin, B: talk to John, C: steal something, D: fight someone, E: this would be a variety of different things. Then they would go back to A. I really was not surprised when a character would do something.
Things I liked:

    1. The action was really good. The fight scenes were well choreographed and thought out.

    2. The characters were interesting. We were given snippets about the character's pasts, enough to be informative but not enough to make it boring.

    3. The story did intrigue me enough I really do want to read the next one in the series. I am curious what is going to happen to the people of the different towns. I wonder if Much will learn to use his new knife. How will the relationship with Robin and Scarlet fare? What is John going to do now?

I did like it enough to read the next in the series. Overall I gave this book 3 stars out of 5.