In fact, my original description for Merry was basically Keira Knightley, but I later tweaked that description to better match the model on the cover. She often came to mind as I was writing the book. Keira Knightley played Robin Hood’s tough and determined daughter in Disney’s Princess of Thieves.

I was inspired by two Robin Hood type heroines. She always brings to mind thoughts of home and hearth. Wren reminds her that if matters had gone differently, Merry might have been wed to her childhood sweetheart and a mother to her own child. But Merry does have a hidden softer side that always comes out when she is around little Wren, a toddler she helped rescue when her village was destroyed two years earlier. I’m pretty sure Merry would say she can’t afford to have a “quirk,” although there are plenty of quirky characters around her. She has lost her faith in God and in others, and she thinks she has to do everything in her own strength. Her main weakness is that her heart has grown hard due to all the tragedy surrounding her in the realm of the evil King John-Prince John of the Robin Hood stories. Merry is physically strong, excellent at acrobatics, stealthy, and she’s also an excellent leader. I would say she resembles Kacy Catanzaro, who took the American Ninja Warrior contest by storm this year and went farther than any other female ever has. Picture a feisty little gymnast meets Robin Hood. She is the tough and strong leader of a band of outlaws in a forest of England during 1216. Lady Merry Ellison is a tiny, striking brunette who has cut her hair to chin length and dresses in boy’s tunics and leggings.

But when he comes face-to-face with the leader of the thieves, he’s forced to reexamine everything he’s known. When the Ghosts of Farthingale Forest are spotted in Wyndeshire, where he serves as assistant to the local earl, he might have found his chance. Timothy Grey, ninth child of the Baron of Greyham, longs to perform some feat so legendary that he will rise from obscurity and earn a title of his own. Bold and uniquely skilled, she is willing to go to any lengths to protect the orphaned children of her former village–a group that becomes known as “The Ghosts of Farthingale Forest.” Merry finds her charge more difficult as their growing notoriety brings increasing trouble their way.

One Young Woman Will Fight for the Innocentīorn a baron’s daughter, Lady Merry Ellison is now an enemy of the throne after her father’s failed assassination attempt upon the king. Meet an acrobatic outlaw in Dina Sleiman’s

Dauntless by Dina L. Sleiman