Not for the Faint of Heart

by Lex Croucher

In Lex Croucher’s queer historical YA adventure, Mariel, Robin Hood’s granddaughter and a fiercely ambitious captain of the Merry Men, accidentally kidnaps Clem, a healer whose optimism challenges her captor’s prickly defenses. As danger draws them closer, their developing romance raises questions about inherited legends, loyalty, and what it really means to help others.

Big Idea

A heroic reputation does not guarantee heroic behavior: people must decide for themselves what courage, care, and leadership require. Croucher’s combination of adventure, humor, and romance also demonstrates how changes in narrative pace can reveal those choices.

Discussion Questions

1.How does being Robin Hood’s granddaughter shape Mariel’s understanding of leadership? When might a famous family legacy become a burden rather than a guide?
2.Clem jokes that the Merry Men are neither merry nor all men. How does this observation expose a gap between the group’s reputation and its reality?
3.How do Mariel and Clem challenge each other’s assumptions about strength, kindness, and vulnerability? Choose a moment that complicates your first impression of either character.
4.How does the novel handle the imbalance of power created by Clem’s kidnapping? What evidence helps you evaluate changes in trust, agency, and their developing relationship?
5.Where does Croucher shift from comedy or action into emotional seriousness? How does that change in pace affect your understanding of the characters or the meaning of heroism?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes📦 Copies of the novel or legally provided excerpts, paper or writing devices, pencils, highlighters, and a board or shared display.

Learning Goals

Use specific textual evidence to explain how Mariel and Clem complicate conventional ideas of heroism.
Analyze how dialogue, sentence length, description, and paragraph breaks influence narrative pace.
Compose an original scene that shifts deliberately between urgent action and reflective conversation.
Revise narrative choices to strengthen character agency, voice, and thematic meaning.

Activity Steps

1.Launch and frame—5 minutes: Introduce the question, 'Who gets to decide whether an action is heroic?' Review Mariel’s connection to Robin Hood and Clem’s position as an unwilling captive; distinguish a character’s intentions from another person’s consent.
2.Read and annotate—10 minutes: In teacher-selected passages featuring Mariel and Clem, students mark action, dialogue, interior reflection, and descriptive pauses. Identify one place where the pace changes and explain its effect with textual evidence.
3.Plan—7 minutes: In pairs, outline an imagined escape or rescue involving Mariel and Clem. Specify what each character wants, who controls the choices, and where urgent movement will give way to a difficult conversation.
4.Draft—15 minutes: Each student writes a 250–350-word scene with a brisk action section and a slower aftermath. Use at least three deliberate pacing techniques and label the piece as an imagined extension rather than an episode from the novel.
5.Workshop—8 minutes: Partners mark where they felt urgency and where they paused. They discuss whether the voices evoke Mariel’s guarded ambition and Clem’s irreverent optimism without reducing either character to a stereotype.
6.Revise and reflect—5 minutes: Students revise one paragraph and submit a brief explanation of how their pacing choices change the reader’s judgment of the supposed heroic act.

Standards Connections

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3: Analyze how complex characters develop, interact, and advance plot or theme.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5: Analyze how an author’s structural choices contribute to a work’s overall structure, meaning, and aesthetic impact.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3.B / W.11-12.3.B: Use narrative techniques, including dialogue, pacing, description, and reflection, to develop experiences and characters.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.5 / W.11-12.5: Strengthen writing through planning, revising, editing, and rewriting.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1 / SL.11-12.1: Participate effectively in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and expressing evidence-based interpretations.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In Not for the Faint of Heart, Lex Croucher brings a queer romantic perspective and irreverent humor to the Robin Hood tradition. Mariel wants to live up to an imposing heroic legacy, while Clem’s kidnapping immediately puts that legacy under scrutiny. For student writers, this premise offers a useful craft question: how can a story move quickly while still giving readers time to question what its characters are doing? A Pace-Write-Read study treats pace as more than speed. Students can examine how exchanges between Mariel and Clem create momentum, how pauses make vulnerability visible, and how shifts between danger, comedy, and intimacy change the reader’s expectations. Use passages from the class edition rather than assumed chapter or page references; students should verify each technique in the text and distinguish observed features from experimental writing exercises. The workshop then turns close reading into practice: notice a choice, try it in an original scene, and read aloud to test its effect.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage of danger with a quieter exchange between Mariel and Clem. Track how much story time each occupies and which language choices make the reading feel faster or slower.
2. Plot	Map how Clem’s accidental kidnapping creates both external problems and relational consequences. Ask students to distinguish events that merely happen next from decisions that cause the next complication.
3. Prosody	Read a Mariel–Clem exchange aloud twice, changing stress, pitch, and pauses. Discuss how delivery can make Clem’s irreverence sound playful, challenging, or defensive without changing the words.
4. Word	Collect verbs and modifiers from a selected passage involving Mariel’s command or Clem’s resistance. Test how replacing one word alters urgency, authority, or comic timing.
5. Concept	Use the premise—Robin Hood’s granddaughter accidentally kidnaps a healer—to identify the collision between heroic legend and questionable conduct. Ask how quickly an opening must establish that contradiction to engage readers.
6. Voice & Worldview	Compare how Mariel’s investment in reputation and Clem’s concern for others shape their language and judgments. Support interpretations with actual dialogue or narration rather than assigning each character a single fixed trait.
7. Point of View	Identify whose perceptions organize a selected scene and what remains inaccessible about the other character. Discuss how limited access can delay understanding of motives and sustain romantic uncertainty.
8. Setting & Place	Examine how the novel’s woodland outlaw setting creates possibilities for concealment, pursuit, and uneven power. In a chosen passage, distinguish setting details that affect movement from those that establish atmosphere.
9. Original Characters	Discuss how Mariel’s prickliness and Clem’s irreverence refresh familiar outlaw and captive roles. Have students identify choices that give each character desires beyond serving the adventure or romance.
10. Dialogue	Study Clem’s joke about the Merry Men’s misleading name as both characterization and challenge. Notice how a short exchange can convey conflict more rapidly than a paragraph explaining the group’s contradictions.
11. Details	Select a small physical or behavioral detail in an encounter between Mariel and Clem. Explain whether it supplies necessary information, reveals emotion, or briefly delays the next action.
12. Descriptions	Compare description during an urgent episode with description during a quieter encounter. Ask what the reader needs to picture immediately and what can be withheld without creating confusion.
13. Firsts	Revisit Mariel and Clem’s first encounter and the first moment a student perceives a change in their relationship. Examine how much space the text gives these thresholds and require evidence for the claimed change.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Identify where a scene makes a character’s immediate goal clear, such as retaining control or resisting captivity. Discuss how concrete obstacles can engage readers before they know the characters’ full histories.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Mark where the novel dramatizes an exchange and where it compresses elapsed time or background. Ask why a confrontation between Mariel and Clem might deserve full scene treatment while other information can be summarized.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate uncertainty about physical danger from uncertainty about trust between Mariel and Clem. Locate a passage where the reader’s expectations shift, and explain what information produces that change.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check how a selected passage introduces the past, anticipates consequences, or leaves an outcome unresolved; do not assume all three devices appear. Discuss how references to Robin Hood’s legacy can make earlier events matter to present decisions without requiring a full flashback.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect several chapter endings in the class edition for unresolved action, emotional uncertainty, or a comic finishing beat. Distinguish an author’s chapter break from a page turn produced by a particular edition’s layout.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite a short imagined Mariel–Clem encounter once as urgent action and once as a hesitant conversation. Compare how changing pace generates different discoveries about their relationship.
20. Play	Use Clem’s teasing of the Merry Men’s name to explore how verbal play can undermine authority. Invite students to create an original exchange that questions a heroic label without copying Croucher’s wording.
21. Performance	Stage a brief exchange with different amounts of silence between speakers. Discuss how Mariel might perform command and Clem might use humor to resist that performance.
22. Personality	Track how Mariel’s guarded ambition and Clem’s optimism affect the timing of their responses. Look for moments that complicate those initial impressions rather than treating personality as unchanging.
23. Humor	Analyze the setup and reversal in Clem’s observation that the Merry Men are neither merry nor all men. Ask how the joke punctures the group’s reputation while keeping the captivity-related power imbalance visible.
24. Pause	Locate a hesitation, reflective beat, or interruption in a significant exchange. Explain how a pause can make readers feel vulnerability or uncertainty more strongly than another line of dialogue would.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for imagery, sound patterns, metaphor, or contrast in a descriptive or emotional passage. If the passage is deliberately plain, discuss how restraint affects pace instead of forcing a poetic interpretation.
26. Repetition	Track recurring references to Robin Hood, the Merry Men, or expectations of leadership. Distinguish a repeated thematic idea from an exact verbal repetition, and examine how its meaning changes with context.
27. Rhythm	Mark sentence lengths and alternating turns in a Mariel–Clem exchange. Test whether a sudden short sentence accelerates the moment, lands a joke, or creates an emotional stop.
28. Punctuation	Inspect punctuation in a passage containing disagreement or banter, then read it aloud as printed. Experiment with changing a full stop to a dash or separating a sentence, explaining the resulting shift in timing.
29. Questions	Track both spoken questions and larger reader questions, such as whether Mariel deserves trust. Ask which questions receive quick answers and which keep the relationship or plot moving.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare Mariel’s and Clem’s responses to the same problem rather than simply labeling them opposites. Examine how juxtaposing command with care can expose competing definitions of courage.
31. Objects	Choose an object actually present in a selected passage and trace what a character does with it. Ask whether it enables action, signals status, or slows attention toward care; a healing-related object is useful only if the passage includes one.
32. Threes	Search a chosen passage for a three-part phrase, sequence, or escalating exchange, without assuming one is present. Alternatively, draft three beats—Mariel commands, Clem challenges, Mariel responds—and test how the third beat changes expectations.
33. Lists	If a passage contains an accumulation of tasks, observations, or complaints, examine whether it creates haste or comic overload. As a writing experiment, list Mariel’s imagined leadership worries, then reduce the list to its most revealing item.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine paragraph breaks and any scene-break spacing in the class edition. Discuss how an isolated response or an unstated feeling can give a Mariel–Clem exchange room to resonate.
35. Art & Graphics	Analyze the actual edition’s cover and any verified visual features for the expectations they create about romance, adventure, and Robin Hood. Treat these as paratext rather than assuming the novel contains illustrations or graphics.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Create a classroom decision map in which students choose between protecting reputation, asserting control, or offering help in an imagined outlaw dilemma. This is an instructional adaptation, not a claim that the novel contains game mechanics.
37. Placement	Examine where Croucher positions an important disclosure, joke, or reaction within a scene. Ask how placing Clem’s challenge before or after an act of apparent heroism would alter the reader’s judgment.
38. Form	Consider how the novel combines historical adventure, romantic development, and comedy. Track how a selected scene serves more than one of these forms and how that combination affects its pace.
39. Dummy	Adapt a picture-book dummy into a six-panel prose storyboard for an imagined Mariel–Clem scene, labeling action, dialogue, and pause. Use the mock-up to test scene proportions rather than treating the novel as an illustrated book.
40. Passion	Ask what Mariel and Clem care about enough to risk discomfort, disagreement, or danger, citing evidence. Have students identify how slowing down around those commitments makes emotional stakes visible.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-Read task: ‘A Command, a Challenge, a Choice.’ Minutes 0–3: Read Clem’s supplied remark about the Merry Men and briefly discuss how humor challenges Mariel’s authority. Minutes 3–5: Plan an explicitly imagined moment in which Mariel orders a hurried departure and Clem insists on stopping to help someone; this is a writing prompt, not a reported episode from the novel. Minutes 5–12: Write 150–200 words, beginning with brisk movement and clipped exchanges, then slowing when Mariel must decide whether to listen. Include a meaningful pause, a concrete detail, and an action that gives Clem agency; do not treat captivity or coercion as proof of affection. Minutes 12–17: Partners read their scenes aloud, marking the exact point where the pace shifts and identifying the language that creates the change. Minutes 17–20: Revise two or three sentences and add an exit note explaining how the new pace affects the reader’s understanding of courage, care, or leadership.

Classroom Activities

Legend Versus Reality: A Two-Speed Rescue

Students examine how Croucher juxtaposes the Merry Men’s heroic reputation with Mariel and Clem’s conflicting perspectives, then write an original, clearly labeled imagined scene involving the pair. Each scene moves from a fast-paced escape or rescue into a slower conversation about who actually needed help, allowing students to test how pacing can question a heroic legend.

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