Robin Hood Book 10: War and Peas by Robert Muchamore Book Review

I read this book knowing I would love it. And I waited ages for it to arrive, like my dad when he was a little kid waiting for Episodes 5 and 6 of Star Wars. Books like these will get children to actually like reading, because it does something that so many authors forget to do – the author, Robert Muchamore, speaks right to them. He knows children want to read about bad people getting thwarted by kids who are independent, scheming, and a little unpleasantly odorous. Too many heroes in children’s fiction are perfect goody two shoes, but what kid hasn’t wanted to at one point or another rob a candy shop or blow up the corrupt politician’s office? Maybe being perfect is overrated in literature.

The last nine books had the titular Robin Hood living in a forest of bandits, outlaws, and refugees from the town of Sherwood who could no longer afford to live under the thumb of Mayor/Crimelord Guy Gisborne and Socialite turned President of the Country Marjorie Kovacevic. Well, Robin, now 15 years old, had to run away from all that because the bounty on his head, in the millions, was too high, and Holland ended up allowing fugitives like him to live in peace. Marjorie turned Sherwood Forest into a warzone and has locked up hundreds of thousands of people, just like Trump and ICE in overdrive. A lot of the rebels have been locked up. Many have died. But hope is not lost. Even though Marjorie had enough support to win the election and start her genocide, her support is slipping, and if the rebels can find a way to overtake their concentration camps…the final fuse just might light.

I don’t honestly know if Muchamore pitched these books to an agent or self-published them (Hot Key Books allows authors themselves to pitch) but every one of these books in the series has a special fearlessness and legitimacy to them. They feel unsanitized in all the best ways. They feel like they didn’t check off a list of demands to not insult or offend readers like how Disney tried to do for Nimona before the producers decided to shop it elsewhere. In this book, the people go on the offense. They fight for a better future. They kill. They betray. They injure. Because these things happen in war. And boy, is it a war out there.

This really feels like the final chapter, the big boiling point. It may be marketed towards children, but this book rivals the biggest war books and stories for adults as well. Muchamore makes it look so easy as these characters take up arms and set traps and fight for their freedom from tyranny. It’s a book that screams to the revolutionist in all of us.

While I don’t think War & Peas is the absolute best of the 10-book series due to a questionable girlfriend and the absence of a fair few characters, plus a lightly sudden ending, it still packs a wallop. I’d put this third place, second going to the very first one that I originally rated only four and a half stars but am now making a solid five, and the gold medal going to the flawless and riotously exciting eighth. 

Everyone knows the legend of Robin Hood. He’s referred to when people everywhere go against the law to do right by common folk who have been wronged. Robert Muchamore needed to really do justice to the name if he was going to use it for this series, and boy, did he. With this final entry, he has cemented the Robin Hood series as the defining books about raging against the machine.

My grade: 5 stars out of 5