A review of Red Riding Hood by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright and David Leslie Johnson

WARNING:  This review is full of spoilers.  Read at your own risk.  

I started reading Red Riding Hood with very high hopes.  I’ve been reading a lot of fairy tale retellings over the past couple months, and this seemed like it would be good.  

It wasn’t as good as I had hoped.  

At first I loved it.  I read all of part one plus a couple chapters in part two in a morning and couldn’t wait until I could figure out what happened next.  After two hundred pages, the stereotypical young adult love triangle started to irritate me.  Boy loves girl; girl thinks he’s nice but she loves mysterious boy who showed up out of nowhere; mysterious boy likes her too but has some reason for why they shouldn’t be together.  Really?  Why haven’t all the young adult authors moved beyond that?  Shouldn’t they?  Shouldn’t the readers demand that they do so?  Personally, I’m pretty sick of love triangles, especially if they’re predictable and poorly written.  

The characters themselves are not very engaging.  I never got attached enough to any of the characters to care what happened to them - even if they died.  I was just like, “Oh look, Lucie’s dead.  Now Henry’s father died.  Now Claude died.  And now The Reeve died” (I actually wouldn’t have cared about The Reeve no matter what because I just didn’t like him).  Some of the deaths were just so unexpected and random that I didn’t even feel upset.  Oh, Valerie’s grandmother died?  I should feel upset.  But I don’t.  They just weren’t that well developed.  

I also didn’t like that there was a “Bonus chapter” online.  Really, it wasn’t like an extra bit about one of the characters or a couple pages of back-story or what the heck Peter did while he was gone.  It was a chapter of the book that got cut off and put online.  It was important to wrapping up the plot.  But why put it only online?  To get people to watch the movie?  To get people who liked the book to buy the movie?  The book isn’t complete without the bonus chapter.  The ending of the last chapter in the book doesn’t make sense without going online and reading the “bonus” chapter which is really not a bonus but the ending of the story.  I hate it when authors do this.  Some people don’t look to see if there’s a website for a book so they have no idea what something means or, in this case, how the story ends.  Seriously, why is the last chapter on the website?  It’s not like they’re making money by advertising things, they just advertise the movie trailer.  

My last complaint is that the level of gore was completely unnecessary.  I didn’t want to read the details of how people were hit by an axe, or how they looked after they were hit by an axe.  Nobody wants to know that.  Well, maybe some people but I don’t want to know them.

Two stars.  

Why adult literature ruins that written for children

Neverwhere ruined Un Lun Dun.  

Stardust ruined any young adult fairy-themed romance ever.  

We Have Always Lived in the Castle ruined Green Angel and any other book with insanity.  

Books written for adults are more interesting because they are often better written.  In addition, the books have more accurate situations because adult writers will not think that they cannot write something that would be inappropriate for children.  Some children’s authors do not know how to explain certain situations because they don’t know what the child knows or does not know.  This leads to scenarios in children’s literature where the violence is too staged, the relationships are too scripted and awkward.  Yes, it tells the story but it leaves the characters a bit flat.  

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle Mary Cat actually poisoned her family because she was mad at them.  Then she went on to do things like nailing books to trees to keep herself safe.  When her cousin came, it was because the book fell leaving her unprotected instead of just a happenstance.  She is clearly insane.  She talks about flying to the moon and living there with her sister-it is always nice on the moon.  In Green Angel, the main character’s parents die but she doesn’t kill them.  Instead of nailing books to trees as protection, she sews spiky things to her jacket to keep herself safe.  We Have Always Lived in the Castle has the space to let a character be truly insane and the writer knows how to do real insanity.  Whereas, in Green Angel the main character, who could easily have been insane and it would have made for a better story, is not.  Her parents were killed in a fire while she was mad at them.  It would have been understandable for her to go insane from fear, guilt, and sorrow.  She does the things an insane person might-adding spiky things to her clothing, gathering rocks for her family members-but the author never makes the leap to true insanity.  

It is this resistance to making situations and characters too real that holds children’s literature back.  There are so many young adult books out there about depression or suicide and other problems that real people face, but even those seem almost unreal.  Sometimes there’s an unrealistically happy ending where anyone who wasn’t nice suddenly sees the error of their ways, or a depressed character is suddenly happy and everything is good.  All bullies end up good in the end, just misunderstood.  People always end up either with their crush or with the right person they hadn’t realized they were meant to be with.  Life is not like this.  

Adult writers know this and they don’t write books that lead to a falsely happy ending.  They have realistic endings even when they are sad or unexpected.  If there is a character who completely changes, it is in a more natural and realistic way.  There are probably some adult books with falsely happy endings and adults who want to read them, but there is a greater potential to present a more honest and realistic telling.  

I know there are books written for children that have more realistic characters and situations, but they often read as an adult trying to relate back to children instead of one human telling another human a story.