To be honest, I hadn’t heard of No Good Deed until I got the invite from the publisher to be part of the blog tour. I read the synopsis and was really intrigued. Lady Robin Hood? Sign me up!
Before we get to an interview with the author, Kara Connolly, let’s check out the book!
Title: No Good Deed
Author: Kara Connolly
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Pub Date: July 18, 2017
Pages: 352
Find it: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon | GoodreadsFans of Dorothy Must Die will love this reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood. Girl power rules supreme when a modern girl finds herself in the middle of a medieval mess with only her smart mouth and her Olympic-archer aim to get her home.
Ellie Hudson is the front-runner on the road to gold for the U.S. Olympic archery team. All she has to do is qualify at the trials in jolly old England. When Ellie makes some kind of crazy wrong turn in the caverns under Nottingham Castle—yes, that Nottingham—she ends up in medieval England.
Ellie doesn’t care how she got to the Middle Ages; she just wants to go home before she gets the plague. But people are suffering in Nottingham, and Ellie has the skills to make it better. What’s an ace archer to do while she’s stuck in Sherwood Forest but make like Robin Hood?
Pulled into a past life as an outlaw, Ellie feels her present fading away next to daring do-gooding and a devilishly handsome knight. Only, Ellie is on the brink of rewriting history, and when she picks up her bow and arrow, her next shot could save her past—or doom civilization’s future.
Sounds good, right?
1. Please give the elevator pitch for No Good Deed.
*clears throat* No Good Deed is about Ellie Hudson, a world-class archer who inadvertently goes back in time and becomes Robin Hood. She just wants to get back to the present before she dies of the plague, but things are bleak and unjust in Nottingham. Ellie takes up her bow to write a few wrongs…but is she making history, or changing it?
2. What sparked the idea?
I’ve loved the Robin Hood legend every since I saw the Disney version when I was a kid. I think that roguish animated Robin Hood may have been my first crush, which is weird to say since he was a fox. (But such a rascal!) Originally Ellie was going to go back in time and stumble into the Maid Marian role, and join the merry men, and…you get the gist. But it didn’t seem right to replace the one female in the story. This way I get a heroine who gets to be awesome with a bow and arrow, and she gets to have a confident who is a strong woman in her own way.
3. Why do you love Ellie and why should we root for her?
Ellie has a strong sense of justice, and she jumps into the fray quickly when someone needs help. She leads with her heart and I hope that will make people willing to follow her on her journey.
4. What was the weirdest thing you googled while researching?
You’d be amazed how many uses there are for urine in the middle ages. You can use it to tan leather, dye fabric, bleach laundry, and fertilize crops. There were convenient casks out on the street to collect donations. (Aren’t you glad you asked?)
5. Without spoilers, what was your favorite scene to write?
My favorite scenes are the ones where the characters get to sparring verbally or physically, or both at the same time. There’s a scene where Ellie and Captain Guilbert, the deputy sheriff, meet with gloves off, and I think it gets to the spirit that I wanted to capture—the banter, the dueling, a little interpersonal dynamic. It’s a challenge to convey danger in one moment and humor in the next. *crosses finger* I hope I do that.
Speed {ish} round:
1. You find out that you’re being published for the first time. Describe the next 5 minutes.
I held it together when my agent called, because I thought maybe I’d want to remember what she said. (I don’t.) As soon as I hung up, I squealed and scared the dogs and did the whole jumping around thing. But I didn’t want to tell anybody yet in case I somehow jinxed it. I mean, nothing was in writing, right? So I took the dogs for a walk. How lame is that? We walked around the neighborhood and I imagined what it would be like to sign books, and what the cover was going to look like, and all the readers who would love my characters as much as I do. When I came back and my agent hadn’t texted “JK!” I decided it was okay to call my mom.
2. What three things would you take to a desert island?
A water purifier, a Swiss army knife, and a giant box of matches. Unless I can take an e-reader with all the books ever on it and an espresso machine.
3. You can only read one book for the rest of your life. What is it?
A survival guide, because clearly this is an end of the world scenario. ;)
4. What book character would you want to date and who would you want to be your BFF?
Corlath from The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. But since that’s an old book, I took a couple of quizzes online, and 3 out of 4 of them say my book boyfriend should be Dimitri from the Vampire Academy series. And I’m totally down with that. I like the serious ones.
I think Jo March and I could hang out. She can get a little overdramatic sometimes, but so can I.
5. What is the one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?
Get your social media game together early on. Pick your user name(s), decide what kinds of things you want to post (if any), and start letting people know who you are.
It feels like forever until the book comes out and then suddenly it’s here (yay!!) and you don’t want to be a Twitter egg with an Instagram feed full of your #nomakeup face and pictures of your food.
Oh, and don’t read your Goodreads reviews. You can’t please all the people all the time (and that’s okay).
6. You wake up and discover you are Bella in Twilight. You know how it plays out. What do you do differently?
Move to Arizona where it’s sunny all the time. Temptation removed. Or maybe I’d just get a hobby and some shutters on my windows.
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Five things about Kara Connolly:
- I make things up and write them down.
- I drink my coffee black because I’m a badass that way.
- I use the word “badass” way too much.
- My first my first book is coming out in July 2017 from Delacorte Press.
- It is—wait for it—totally badass.
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Huge thanks to Delacorte Press for the invite to the blog tour and to Kara for taking the time!
Have you read this book? What did you think?
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That was a fun review. I love that the author took an online quiz to find her book boyfriend. Dmitri, not so bad.
Lovely blog tour post sweetie :D Thank you for sharing about this book. <3 Love your interviews, always. I'm a bit curious about this book :D Looks awesome and I do like Robin Hood.