Full Review

Clem is an apprentice healer who’s been coming up with some pretty nifty experimental salves lately and really pushing medical boundaries (no more leeches!). So when a band of Merry Men come to kidnap old Rosie, her mentor and childhood saviour, Clem volunteers to take her place. Maybe she can help their fight for justice? An eternal optimist, she’s soon getting along well with her captors, except for sullen teenage Morgan who hates everyone, and their grumpy captain, Mariel Hartley-Hood, who seems suspicious of fun and positive emotion in general.

Mariel is the daughter of the Merry Men’s commander, Jack Hartley, and she’s finding it hard to get her father’s respect for her fighting abilities, in this band that is considerably less merry/justice-oriented and way more hierarchical than it was under her grandfather, Robin. Why else has her father given her this motley crew of Men? Sure, they fight well enough, but they keep joking around with the captive healer and having fun – or in Morgan’s case, having outrageous adolescent sulks – instead of being unrelentingly stern and military. Don’t even get her started on Clem, with her incessant cheerfulness and distracting blonde curls – she’s just a prisoner. No one special.

But then events explode, and Mariel’s raggedy band of misfits finds themselves at the forefront of ambushes, adventures, rescues, vengeance and double-crossings, as friendships and more-than-friendships are formed, and extreme peril ensues.

Well, I was so keen to read this book because I loved Lex Croucher’s debut YA novel, Gwen and Art Are Not in Love, and it did not disappoint. This book is hilarious, as well as tender, romantic and touching. I literally laughed and cried. The pace cracks along and it’s very well written (see literary features below). I gobbled it all up in one morning. Read it – it’s great.

Verdict: Witty, swashbuckling rom-com

Title: Not for the Faint of Heart

Tagline: An adventure so good it should be outlawed

Author: Lex Croucher

Cover: Still looking for those details! (I read the ebook. I don’t know why ebooks don’t bother with cover credits, but they don’t.)

First published: Bloomsbury Childrens Books, 2024

Length: 400 pages

ISBN: 9781526651846

Awards: not yet

Other: It has a fabulous floor plan of Underwood at the beginning – see below. (I’m a sucker for peritexts of all sorts, but especially maps and floorplans.)

Genre: historical fantasy (no magic – alternate history); romance; action-adventure; queer fiction

Representation: loads! The main characters and some significant minor characters are queer. Merry Men are diverse in gender (male, female & non-binary) and ethnicity (anglo, Black, Japanese). A main character suffers anxiety attacks due to what seems to be PTSD.

Suitability: years 8-12.

>>> Click here for content warnings (potential minor spoilers)

kidnapping; forcible chloroform equivalent; anaesthetic without consent; being bound and gagged; battle violence (swords, knives, bow & arrow); deaths, both in backstory and main story, with one particularly tragic on-page death; parental coldness, disappointment and withholding of love; numerous injuries, including dental, and medical treatment; underage drinking by a minor character (disapproved of by other characters); passionate kissing; sleeping in same bed as love interest – not represented as sexual; minor swearing and a scattering of f-words, used in a comic context.

Themes: friendship; familial love – both presence and absence; self-belief (presence & absence)

Literary features/tropes: third person limited perspective with alternating character focalisation (Clem and Mariel); free indirect style; tropes: grumpy/sunshine and found family. Well depicted character development, particularly for Mariel. Clem and Mariel are well rounded, with psychologically realistic strengths, flaws and motivations. Intertextuality, particularly (obviously) with the Robin Hood legend. Hilarious snark & banter throughout, including witty & lively contemporary dialogue, description and imagery … see some examples below:

• ‘Wrong,’ said Morgan. ‘Mariel was hatched from an egg, soft-boiled in the fires of hell.’
• ‘… the guards gave me a pretty enthusiastic beating at that house, so I’m about as useful as a knitted fish right now.’
• “Big John… had an enormous, alarming grin on his face the entire time like he was hungry for justice and he’d just stumbled upon a vigilante justice buffet.”
• “Mariel was strong. It was probably from hefting that enormous chip on her shoulder…”
• “Morgan made an exasperated grunting sound before turning over with all the grace of a beached seal.”

Imagery is also used in a more serious way to illustrate character, emotion and setting:

• “She felt like she’d stumbled into one of those fairy circles her mother had warned her about as a child, and come out of it changed and stupid.”
• “… she laughed. Not a full-bellied laugh, but still, it was beautiful to watch – unexpected, like a stubborn shock of wildflowers in a barren field.”
• “It was a misty summer morning, the cold clinging to the ground as the pink of the sunrise started to filter through the trees. The air was wet with the smell of earth and mulch and moss, and the doves were warbling soft good mornings to each other from the canopy above.”

Cover notes: Love, love, love the cover. Green background aligns with the Robin Hood setting. The little arrow through the A in ‘heart’ likewise echoes the Robin Hood, with a subtle nod to Cupid’s arrow & romance. The main illustration is an action shot of Clem and Mariel riding a horse, with cloaks and Clem’s curls billowing out, Clem looking back at their pursuers, and Mariel cutting her eyes to Clem. Mariel has a quiver of arrows on her back. Green leaves are raining down on them. Perfection!

Audio narrator: Kit Griffiths and Olivia Dowd. They were fine, but I must admit that I bailed on the audiobook in favour of the ebook, which is unusual for me. I feel Lex Croucher is better read than listened to. You need to keep the pace cracking along in a way that’s hard to do in an audiobook, and you need to get the tone right. It was just moving too slowly for my liking.

NSW syllabus: good wide reading choice for years 8-12. Given its many literary techniques, it’d make a good contemporary text for English study in a suitable school, perhaps for a year 9 genre study. It would make a good option for 11 English Extension 1 independent research project (Texts, Culture and Value), looking at how the Robin Hood story has been reimagined to reflect different contexts.

If you like this, try: Lex Croucher’s other YA novel, Gwen & Art Are Not in Love, which is just as fabulous, and set in a post-Arthurian context. Other books with the ‘found family’ trope, e.g. Eleanor Jones Is Not a Murderer by Amy Doak. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo also includes ‘found family’, grumpy/sunshine, action-adventure, humour and queer romance. Other funny medieval-y novels with spirited female heroines, e.g. Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. Other medieval-y novels that have “alternative fantasy timeline[s]” (Croucher’s Author’s Note), e.g. the wonderfully funny & romantic My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows. Or another sapphic rom-com involving a fight for justice, Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough, one of my favourite funny YA novels.

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Images are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.