Red Riding Hood ~ Sarah Blakely-Cartwright review

Red Riding Hood
Poppy
January 25, 2011
352 pages
Buy/info at Amazon

Valerie, Red Riding Hood's main character, has grown up in the village of Daggerhorn alogn with Lucy, her sister, the pretty one, the kind one, the elegant one.

But Daggerhorn, a place where everyone knows everyone else, is also a town haunted by one fact: every month they're forced to make a sacrifice. THe wolf the puts the town in danger has been kept at bay for generations with animal sacrifices from the villagers.

Until now.

Now the village--and the girls, especially--are in mortal danger.


The last/bonus chapter of the book is going to be posted here to coincide with the movie's release-well, actually, on the 14th to avoid spoilers. It's to avoid movie spoilers. (If you bought the ebook, it will be delivered then, too.) Sounds fun!

There's a version coming out on the 16th, so that one might have the last/bonus chapter included :) (This is the one I linked to)

(and the book, Amazon, etc summaries have a lot more spoilers than my summary, once again!)

This Red Riding Hood is definitely very, very different from the fairy tale we all know. To both and not so good ends.

Sarah Blakely Cartwright's novel is probably one of the most beautifully laid out books I've read recently. There are drawings and big, old looking 'once upon a time' text pages that start the story and circular designs on the chapter number pages.

The design elements, though, also mean that the 329 page book (the last page of the story says '329') is probably closer to 300 pages. And while I have nothing agaainst shorter books (I read much shorter and much longer books all the time), I felt like this book had a lot packed into those 300/329 pages.

I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know how closely the book does follow the movie, but what it seemed like was that there were a lot of events in the book that took more to show in words than they would have on screen and so we didn't get quite enough of them for them to really make an impact.

I never quite had the chance to make an emotional connection with the characters. The overall story was still an enjoyable one that is an interesting twist on the Red Riding Hood tale we are all familiar with.

I do intend to see the movie (and find it interesting that the two movie adaptation novels I've read are movies with Amanda Seyfried). I also am interested in seeing what author Sarah Blakely-Cartwright does with her own sotry if she ever publishes an original novel.


6/10

(received from the publisher)