Exclusive interview with author Kris Kennedy and a review of her sexy new romance novel set in the time of Robin Hood in medieval England
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
“As I imagined it, the story had a rather Robin Hood-esque feel, except…the hero was the one taking her where she didn’t want to go, and the heroine was the Robin Hood character,” says Defiant author Kris Kennedy. “Defiant today bears very little resemblance to this. Everything about this story, right down to the plot, morphed as I wrote it.”
Defiant is set in 1215 just prior to the signing of the Magna Carta. A secret Father Peter knows could overthrow the king. Jamie Lost is a knight ordered by King John to capture Father Peter. Eva is a young woman on a mission. She’s searching for Father Peter, who saved her and her charge ten years earlier. Jamie and Eva work together to find Father Peter. The attraction they feel towards each other is not something they can resist.
Kennedy’s book is filled with action and rogue knights. There are mercenaries, seductive women and vivid pictures of a dark time in medieval Britain. The book is sexy. It’s not always clear who’s the hero and who’s the villain. Kennedy says the story idea first came to her about five years ago.
“There were a multitude of creative challenges for me with this story, but Eva was not one of them. She was always waiting there, fully formed, and just stepped out onto the stage of each scene. All I had to do was scramble to get it all down.”
Kennedy has written many stories set in this era, so her research spans many years. Her extensive research on King John’s reign focused special attention on the Magna Carta era. “I researched via tottering piles of the big, fat academic books, the wonderful kind, and I also researched online. Luckily, there’s always research specific to the particular story, and that’s fun. Of course, there’s always the chopping of scenes with research done specifically for the story, which is not so fun.”
“I have a small child, and I write big, history-heavy stories that require lots of plotting, lots of research, and lots of revising,” says Kennedy. “I’ve learned a great deal of about storytelling, about being a professional, and mostly about myself as an author, a mom, a wife, and a person. I find that endlessly fascinating. When I’m writing, when I’m storytelling, I feel that I’m combing the story out, uncovering it, de-tangling it, finding the true color and highlights and tone. That’s why it takes me time to write a story.”
For Defiant, Kennedy needed to become an expert on King’s John’s household knights, the slave trade in 12th and 13th centuries, travel distances and methods of the time including river ferries, perceptions of disease and contagion, manuscript binding, children’s games, goldsmithing and jewelry-making, treatment of Jews, and wolves and their extinction in medieval England.
Kennedy is based in Seattle and was born on the East Coast. Her previous story, The Irish Warrior, another medieval romance, won the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript in 2008. It was later released in June 2010 and is in bookstores everywhere. Kennedy is currently working on another sexy medieval adventure, this one with con men and silk merchants.
Defiant by Kris Kennedy. Mass Market Paperback, 400 pages, Publisher: Pocket (April 26, 2011), Language: English, ISBN: 9781439195901 $7.99
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