I had a hard time getting into this story. The action and intrigue picks up a bit as the story progresses, but I don't think that was my main issue. The book is rather dialogue heavy, and given the setting, it's burdened with a lot of "knowest thou not" and such. The writing is decent. I don’t have any particular complaints -just that it was too tame to overcome the muddying of dialogue. I wanted some real action, and it picked up to a light jog at best. ( )

This is definitely an adventure for boys to read. It tells a Robin Hood like story of adventure and life during the middle ages. ( )

Originally published in 1928, Tod of the Fens is one of six titles chosen as a Newbery Honor Book in 1929 - along with The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, Millions of Cats, The Boy Who Was, Clearing Weather, and The Runaway Papoose - and follows the story of a practical joke played by Prince Hal (eventually King Henry V) on the citizens of Boston, a wool-trading town in the fens of Lincolnshire. Although the book is named for him, Tod - a sort of jovial semi-outlaw/unemployed sailor, whose band frequents the watery labyrinth of the fens (and so named because of his woolly hair - a "tod" being a unit used to measure the weight of wool) - is really no more the focal point of the story, than any one of a number of other characters, from the masquerading Prince Hal, to the worthy Sir Frederic Tilney, with his visionary ship-building project, or his daughter, Johanna.

That fracturing of narrative focus, as it concerns the protagonist (or lack thereof), can also be seen in the story itself, which seems to jump around quite a bit, shifting from Prince Hal's trickery, to Sir Frederic's new trading partnership, to town politics, to Johanna's growing relationship with her young intended, Gilbert Branche, to scheming German ("Easterling") merchant-pirates. The result is an oddly disjointed and unsatisfying story that never really allows the reader to really settle into its world, or identify with its characters. It was all very interesting, of course - the depiction of the wool trade in the fifteenth century (the author gives a list of historical sources, in the rear of the book), the tensions between England, which had as yet to truly develop a merchant fleet, and her continental neighbors (the Germans, in particular, are described in a racialized way, as being "course and red"), the portrait of the social customs of the day - but in the end, I wasn't terribly impressed.

Still, I don't want to overstate the case. Although Tod of the Fens probably isn't a tale that will keep you on the edge of your seat, it wasn't terrible either. Whether it deserved to be Newbery material is another question, of course. The illustrations by Warwick Goble, who is particularly known for his fairy-tale art, were very appealing, both the plates and the chapter-heading black silhouettes. All in all, this is one I would recommend to those readers with an interest in the history of historical fiction for children, to anyone with a desire to read all the Newbery selections, or to Warwick Goble Fans. ( )