Category: fantastic fantasy

THE END of Valentine Week 2025: Fairytale Fantasy, Day SEVEN

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

This year’s theme: RED RIDING HOOD

Here we are, at the end of Valentine Week 2025.

The novels I have featured this year:

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)—reviewed HERE

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie published–Clockpunk Press, which seems to be owned by the author)–reviewed HERE

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey (2011, Harlequin Nocturne)–reviewed HERE

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)–reviewed HERE

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)—reviewed HERE

TODAY:

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)–quick capsule review

AND

Other interesting fictions based on Little Red

First, a capsule review:

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)

I reviewed this novel for my first series of Valentine Week posts, in 2022. Find my review HERE.

A quick recap and a few thoughts: The really nice cover art screams Little Red, and a few of the superficial details do, too. But for the most part, this novel is Beauty and the Beast all the way. As we’ve seen this week, Beauty and the Beast makes a natural pairing with Red Riding Hood, and elements of both fairy tales are often seen in retellings of Red Riding Hood. I think it’s interesting that in these novels–and especially in Whitten’s–the marketing all points toward Red Riding Hood. Why not Beauty and the Beast? That’s especially true of Whitten’s novel. Would a content analysis of fairytale retellings published in 2020 and 2021 reveal a surplus of Beauty and the Beast? It’s a mystery to me why marketing departments sell readers via Little Red but the story itself goes all Beauty and the Beast on us. Could the popular culture appeal of the Disney Beauty and the Beast (which I actually really like, by the way) be so overwhelming that books and their covers need to veer away?

Whitten’s YA novel, which features many of the usual YA tropes, is about two sisters, one of whom has to be given to the wolf–some mysterious creature in the woods–in a murkily-explained ritual sacrifice. The main character gets shipped off to the wolf’s castle, where she finds a tormented beast laboring under a curse. The most interesting part of this novel, in my opinion, is the sentient forest. But see my post of 2022 for a full review.

OTHER RED RIDING HOOD FICTIONS:

—The Path, a single-player indie video game that re-invents Red Riding Hood as a parable of emerging womanhood. It is stunning, an art object all its own and a really creepy horror-themed, Freudian-infused journey. There’s only one rule to the game: “Stay on the path.” BUT in order to win the game you must: (SPOILER ALERT!) go off the path! You can get it on Steam for PC.

—Into the Woods. Red Riding Hood is one of the major story lines in the wildly popular Steven Sondheim 1986 musical, and Little Red herself is one of the major characters. In 2014, Disney (did I say I wouldn’t talk about Disney in this series? I lied.) made a movie based on the musical.

—Angela Carter’s amazing Red Riding Hood short stories, in her collection titled The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harper & Row, 1979). There are Bluebeard retellings, Beauty and the Beast retellings, and many more, all beautiful, all strange, all completely wonderful. The main Red Riding Hood retelling is “The Company of Wolves.” It was the basis for a film directed by Neil Jordan in 1984. Two other tales in Carter’s collection are based on some version of the Red Riding Hood folktale: “The Werewolf” and “Wolf-Alice.” But “The Company of Wolves is especially superb. “See!” it ends. “sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.” Wow, what a story.

You can get this collection at Amazon in hard cover, paperback, and audiobook; in paperback at Barnes & Noble; and in ebook and audiobook formats on Apple.

HERE’S WHERE I ANNOUNCE MY FAVORITES

If we are speaking of the novels I’ve reviewed, that’s a hard one. I liked two of them–Meyer’s Scarlet and Lackey’s Beauty and the Werewolf–but I didn’t just adore any of them.

BUT I do adore that Angela Carter short story, “The Company of Wolves.” And I love the indie game The Path. If I were more of a musical comedy fan, I’d probably mention Into the Woods as well.

Valentine Week 2025: Fairytale Fantasy, Day SIX

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

This year’s theme: RED RIDING HOOD

A reminder–The novels I’ll review during this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series:

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)—reviewed HERE

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie published–Clockpunk Press, which seems to be owned by the author)–reviewed HERE

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey (2011, Harlequin Nocturne)–reviewed HERE

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)–reviewed HERE

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)–TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)

And finally: a medley of interesting outlier pieces, all based on Little Red

TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL:

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)

Buy this novel–and all the books in its series, The Lunar Chronicles–on Amazon in hard cover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats. If you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited, you can read it there free. At Barnes & Noble, Scarlet is available in hard cover, paperback, ebook, and audio formats, and the other books in the Lunar Chronicles as well. In addition, several of the series books (not Scarlet, though) are available in large print editions, and you can listen to the audiobook versions of several of the series books with a Barnes & Noble audiobooks subscription free–again, though, not Scarlet. Apple offers Scarlet and all the other books in the series in ebook and audio formats, and so does Kobo. For more about all these books, visit the author’s web site.

How about that, a sci-fi Red Riding Hood! This novel is set in a dystopian future where humans have settled the moon and then mutated. The moon people, led by their evil queen, want to become humanity’s new overlords. Against this setting, we have a girl with flaming red hair and a temper to match. We have a grandmother. And we have a lot of werewolf-type large buff guys. As with most of the books I’ve reviewed this week, the story may have been inspired by the Red Riding Hood folk tale, but there the resemblance ends. I keep being astonished, though, at how many of these Riding Hood retellings feature werewolves–and astonished, as I’ve said, to learn that werewolves really are part of the deep folkloric background of the tale.

Like Red Rider, the Ellison novel I reviewed on day one of Valentine Week, Meyer’s novel is set in the future, a dystopian future where werewolves play an evil role in turning the earth into a hellhole. Unlike Ellison’s novel, where the vibe is pretty much fantasy, the vibe in Meyer’s book is unmistakably SF, including all manner of SF gadgetry, including futuristic air cars and futuristic maglev trains. Scarlet is a girl who has had to learn to be tough, because she leads a tough life. When she meets a mysterious man (yep, he’s a prizefighter. . .werewolves and prizefighters. . .this must be a thing), she is drawn to him but also repelled by his strangeness. Her grandmother has been kidnapped, though, and the police are no help, so Scarlet takes help where she can find it–the help of the man named Wolf. Violence and peril ensue.

Here’s what happened when I started reading this novel. It is Book 2 of a series, and I had hoped this book, like other mid-series books, would catch me up about the doings of Book 1 in some handy little paragraph early on. Unlike the Lackey novel I reviewed a few days ago, the individual books of The Lunar Chronicles are not stand-alone novels within a larger framework, but true sequels. I soon discovered that without reading Book 1, Cinder (yep, based on Cinderella), I was at sea. Cinder, the title character of Book 1, plays a major role in this second book, too. After a lot of grumbling, I got Cinder and started all over from the beginning, Book 1, chapter 1, page 1.

I’m glad I did. The story arc of the series unfolds as a nice whole, even though Cinder’s and Scarlet’s stories, based on different fairytale tropes, have some differences. And best of all, there’s no hard cliffhanger ending at the end of Cinder. If you’ve followed this blog, you know how much I hate those. As a result, I had two great reading experiences. If I never continue to Book 3, I’ll still feel very fond of the two books I did read. And I really might continue, because the writing is good, the plot zips along, and the characters are fun. I really like Cinder and Scarlet. They are kind of anti-Disney anti-princesses. (That’s a GOOD thing.) Enjoy these books! If you do read Scarlet, though, I recommend you read Cinder first.

NEXT UP: As Valentine Week ends, I’ll do a quick mini-review of For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten, and give you a link to my full review of a few year’s ago. I’ll also mention a whole treasure-chest of other Red Riding Hood experiences, some in book form, some not.

Valentine Week 2025: Fairytale Fantasy, Day FIVE

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy2 Comments

the day itself!

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!

This year’s theme: RED RIDING HOOD

A reminder–The novels I’ll review during this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series:

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)—reviewed HERE

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie published–Clockpunk Press, which seems to be owned by the author)–reviewed HERE

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey (2011, Harlequin Nocturne)–reviewed HERE

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)–TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)

And finally: a medley of interesting outlier pieces, all based on Little Red

TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL:

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)

You can find this novel on Amazon in hard cover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats. At Barnes & Noble, get it in paperback and ebook formats, and free as an audiobook with a Barnes & Noble audiobooks subscription–otherwise the audio CD version is pretty pricey. Both Kobo and Apple offer ebook and audiobook versions. Google Play sells the ebook version. Best of all, check out the author’s web site HERE to see how you can order the ebook through Bookshop.org, benefiting an indie bookstore of your choosing while also giving a bit of a commission to the writer. Visitors to Hodge’s web site will find other goodies there, including an alternate ending and a playlist for Hodge’s curated soundtrack. You can download that on Spotify right from her web site.

Hodge is a YA writer, and Crimson Bound is a YA book “inspired by” the Red Riding Hood story and also the opulent court of 17th century Versailles. It is packed full of lore–any fantasy reader who loves a book for its lore may love this one.

But while the story may have been inspired by Red Riding Hood, this is not really a fairytale retelling, in that not much of the fairytale remains. As Hodge comments in the book’s acknowlegements, she was also inspired by a different folktale, “The Girl With No Hands.” Another source of material, she says, are the Old Norse sagas Völuspá and Vǫlundarkviða, both part of the Poetic Edda. (The quickest way to find out about that cycle of poetic narratives is to start HERE and use the bibliography to go further.)

Crimson Bound offers up some of the familiar Red Riding Hood tropes. There’s a grandmother-like figure, the main character’s aunt. The main character faces a wolf-like creature in a scary woods and must choose between two paths. There’s also a red cloak. But as the story begins, Hodge teases the reader with snatches of what looks like a different folk tale entirely–maybe a little whiff of Hansel and Gretel. This tale turns out to be part of Hodge’s own intricate lore. How completely that lore is beholden to her sources of inspiration, I can’t really say, but they seem at odds with the courtly Versailles backdrop. On the other hand, we know that a lot of fairytale material was reshaped from folk tale into literary form by Charles Perrault, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, and others at the court of the Sun King. Whatever its exact origins, any reader of Hodge’s novel can agree it is saturated with a fairytale atmosphere.

I found Crimson Bound to be a bit overwhelming. Every time I thought I had the characters sorted out and their motives figured out, the scenario got murkier. The novel is interesting in that the main character is no damsel in distress but a hardened killer, and a person who regards herself as damned. There is a lot of lore about demonic forces here, and a lot of questing for a magic sword that will somehow save the world from those forces. This is a world where the darkness is literally encroaching on the light, and the heroine must fight to save the world against the final darkness–in spite of knowing that she can just relax and be a demon. There seems to be allegory going on, although I was never quite sure.

As in most YA fantasy novels, the heroine is also torn between a dark dangerous sexy man and a more benign man.

I should mention, too, that the language is at times very beautiful–poetic in the best sense, not the cheap trashy Hallmark card sense. I admired that.

By the end of the novel, my head was spinning trying to keep track of so many bits of lore, so many mixed motives, so many outright obscure motives, so many ornate rooms in the palace. It was an interesting book, though.

AND ANOTHER THING: HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!

Did Valentine’s Day really originate with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fowls, Assembly of the Birds), when Chaucer envisions a day when a great congregation of birds assemble to choose their mates? “The lyf so short, the crafte so long to lerne. . .” Not only that, it’s really HARD to pick the perfect mate, especially when someone else, or some unstoppable force, or maybe peer or social pressure, is working on you to pick X when you actually love Y. Dame Nature in the end lets the beautiful female eagle make her own decision, in spite of the various pushy guy eagles who keep chirping (squawking?) “Pick me! Pick me!”

Or was the Roman fertility festival of the Lupercalia the real origin of Valentine’s Day? Or was it one of the many, many Saint Valentines of the Roman Catholic calendar?

As a lover of Chaucer, I vote for him. But I don’t think anyone really knows for sure. So eat lots of chocolates, grab yourself some fairytale fantasy, and read, read, read.

NEXT UP: A review of Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)