It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago.
There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Sometimes, there are men. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there's something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined.
Red doesn't like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn't about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods.
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[The fellow across the fire gave Red the once-over, from the wild corkscrews of her hair peeking out from under her red hood to the small hand axe that rested on the ground beside her]***
(@TitanBooks, 18 June 2019, 363 pages, ebook, copy from @TitanBooks and voluntarily reviewed)
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I've read other book by the author and been very impressed by her re-telling of well-known fairy tales. I was really looking forward reading this book and seeing what she does with Little Red Riding Hood. I was not disappointed. This is a corker of a novel. I read a lot of retellings and I prefer ones that are bold and where the author tries to do something really original using the source material as a springboard rather than just a new, slightly different version. Red is an amazing character. I loved her. She's such a bad ass. I love dystopian novels so this was an added bonus for an already great book. Little Red Riding Hood transported to a post-apocalyptic world? Who could resist such a treat?
