Juliana Wessex was orphaned after her uncle killed her father for his estate and tried to kill her, too, but she escaped and lived amongst the woods for years. She became what was known as the Cloaked Bandit, steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Sound familiar? What she wasn’t expecting was to bump into a childhood neighbor.

Once Juliana is plucked up by Lord Colin Goodrich, the childhood neighbor, and could-have-been-betrothed-from-childhood, things go downhill from there.

This particular tale places you in a poor England and the patrons are suffering, thus the need for the Cloaked Bandit. In the beginning, it does well to situate you in the time period, but as the book progresses it swiftly loses its world building and shifts into a character driven story.

The plot is loose, it takes to the background instead of foreground to make way for the characters, which by the way don’t exactly grow by leaps and bounds. There seems to be instant love between Colin and this Cloaked Bandit, which he then realizes is none other than Lady Juliana. There is no such thing as a slow burn love affair here, as Colin swoops right into flirting and laying it on overly thick, enough to make me feel awkward because of the lame attempts.

The relationship between them is entirely forced, too, there are some instances where – as sweet and naive as what Colin could be, he grew to be manipulative [to me,] and tried to sway Juliana too much, when she was standing firm on what she wanted to do.

Overall, this story was not for me, it was too lovey dovey, not enough actual plot, but the writing was of a good quality, because of that I’ll give it 2.8 crowns.

What has been a good Robin Hood retelling that you’ve read or want to read?