"Damsel in Distress" by Shannon Drake
Avon, 1992 || Read and reviewed February/March 2025
Review 5 of 13 Robin Hood historical romances. If you’ve noticed that the total number has gone up, it’s because it has! For better or worse! Very few of these seem to hit the sweet spot being both a Robin Hood book and a romance novel. Unfortunately, “Damsel in Distress” by Shannon Drake couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, and kind of failed at being either.
This book opens with a prologue that only serves to stress that the only way for England to know peace is through the existence of good nobles who rule over their feudal lands fairly and serve the King because he is inherently good and wise. Which is not the start to any decent Robin Hood book.
Kat's father explains to her:
“Most laws are good. They protect men. Even the way that we live is good. You see, the peasants and the villeins, people such as this, they work for us, as well as tilling their own little pieces of tenant land. And we protect them within our castle walls. We settle their disputes. We hold court over our serfs.”
“Damsel in Distress” follows the unconvincing romance of Katherine and Damian, who are both Robin’s cousins. On opposite sides of the family – it’s okay, don’t worry about it. Readers were reassured that the mutual cousin thing was not a big deal at every opportunity. Both Kat and Damian, while they don’t live as outlaws full-time, have alternate personas (Lady Greensleeves and The Silver Sword) that they use while separately gallivanting about the forest helping people. Apparently, they both have quite the reputation, equal to that of Robin’s. I didn’t see much evidence for them deserving their reputations, but okay.
I could give an overview of the plot, but it feels too convoluted to effectively write a summary. Perhaps that’s why the synopsis available online and the synopsis on the paperback don’t agree with each other. Here’s what I think is worth knowing: Damian has been given Kat’s hand in marriage by King Richard and they aren’t jazzed about it. Kat does not know that Damian is also The Silver Sword and allied with Robin, but Damian does know that Kat is Lady Greensleeves and allied with Robin. Kat does not know that he knows she is Lady Greensleeves. Robin knows everything. Actually, everyone around Kat seems to know everything, and she knows nothing.
In the novel itself, this wasn’t hard to follow, I promise. It was silly, but not hard to follow.
The plot mostly revolves (around and around, with dizzying repetition) how Kat absolutely DOES NOT want to be married to Damian. Damian, upon realizing that she is beautiful, does not mind so very much.
Reasons Kat does not want to be married:
She doesn’t want to lose her freedom to act as Lady Greensleeves, which is hilarious because I have no idea what she does as Lady Greensleeves, except share helpful information to Robin and run through the forest when she’s had enough of her family castle. She’s apparently well known… for something. I couldn’t begin to guess why.
In addition, she’s adamantly and vehemently of the mind that all Normans are inherently evil people. The only exception being her saint of a dead father, who was the only good Norman to have ever existed because he alone understood the plight of the common man who deserved to be subjugated fairly. (Man, I was so exhausted by this rhetoric.) Kat herself is only “half Norman” because her mother (also dead, of course) was Saxon, and she explains in the text that she doesn’t count as a regular Norman.
“Your father was a Norman lord!”
“And a very special, unique man!”
Now feels like a good time to mention. Every other line of dialogue ended in an exclamation point. Visually, this was annoying. Worse, I have a very active inner reading voice, and my inner reading voice felt like nails on a chalkboard with all of these exclamation points. The above example is an argument, so it’s not the worst offender, but even breathless compliments or other softly spoken words included exclamation points. I was drowning in them, and it made it hard to want to keep reading.
The Robin Hood elements of this book were everywhere, but poorly used. That opening prologue includes people being cruelly punished for poaching and breaking forest law – classic opening for many a Robin Hood story. Robin is there, Will Scarlet, Tuck, and Little John get mentioned. Little John gets a few lines. Marian is also there!
Marian and Robin have one of the most intriguing romantic encounters in the whole book. After Robin, Damian (as the Silver Sword), and a wayward Kat hold up a caravan carrying stolen church reliquaries, who should (inexplicably) tumble out of the one the wagons but Marian. Apparently, we later learn, she and Robin were betrothed at one point, but then he was outlawed and they haven’t seen each other in a while. There’s some confusing backstory about how they parted on bad terms, which means that when Robin sees her, he goes completely white with shock, and barely recovers enough to get into an argument with her. She spits at him, she’s so mad. It was not so much “Oh shit, it’s her” but rather “Oh shit, it’s her.” Once Marian’s there, Robin is so completely useless at finishing up the robbery that Damian volunteers to escort her back to camp to separate them so business can conclude.
I enjoyed that more than anything else in the book. Marian does have a few other scenes, too, but they’re mostly plot convenience for information sharing. Oh well.
To my great confusion, while Lady Greensleeves and The Silver Sword were allied with Robin, they worked independently from each other. All three of them were supposed to have their own thing going on, even though all three of them had the same mission and ideals. I think the solution here was to have Damian and Kat be integrated into Robin’s world, rather than in its network. Maybe the author was afraid Robin would steal the story if he was more involved, but I didn’t understand why these two would choose to work independently when they have a cousin RIGHT THERE who is doing the same thing with more resources.
In case it wasn’t clear, I wasn’t a fan of this one. It’s unconvincing as a Robin Hood book. Even more unconvincing as a romance novel. It had plenty of the elements and bones of a romance novel; it’s actually the first proper “bodice ripper” of the Robin Hood romance novels that I’ve read! “Bodices” were ripped no less than three times. But at no point did I feel like Damian and Kat actually loved each other. I don’t know, wouldn’t it be nice if the hero and heroine of a romance novel actually loved each other? Weird ask, I guess.
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