Black Arrow

[Andrew]

It was OK... I guess... It was pretty much your basic Midevil (sp?) story if you think about it. It was fairly well written, after all it is a Classic. It didn't make you think a whole lot though, like some other books. Mabye I've just been spoiled becuase I've been reading Tolkien's stuff all the time. If anyone out there like Tolkien or Lord of the Rings or someting please e-mail me.

[Rosalind]

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when reading books like 'The Black Arrow' is taking them too seriously. I read the book when I was quite young, and loved it. Reading it again, I still love it, but it remains a pretty straight forward adventure. It's Robert Louis Stevenson--he wrote for adolescent boys, after all! Sure, the 'straght forward adventure' of his time was more complex than most of the rubbish that passes for a good adventure in modern movies, but as you say, it's still a basic medieval story. So reading it for literary themes and high minded foo-faw, reading it as a Classic-with-a-capital-C, ruins the affect.
I'd say Tolkien wrote basic adventure stories, too, using all the archetypes, but his basic adventure stories were really nothing more than an excuse to create his world, his mythology, and his own very earnest literary themes, which, yes, make people think. So I guess you could argue that reading LOTR (which I am by no means insulting, btw, I really love Tolkien) only for the plot is the same kind of mistake as reading RLS for everything but the plot.