Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The Girl in Red

Overall really enjoyed it. I loved that our main character, Red, is mixed race and enjoyed the brief discourse on race and how some people, even in times of crisis, will gladly let their racism fly. In the beginning when one antagonist basically asks Red her ethnicity upon first meeting, it reminded me of so many people doing it to me. It's annoying to say the least.
I think as a retelling of a fairy tale, it was quite good too. Loved that it was a dystopian kind of setting although it wasn't the best idea for me to read a book on a respiratory pandemic while living through C19 and seeing parallels to how some fictional characters acted and how real life people are acting. Humans are predictable I guess.
<Spoiler>since Red and the kids were able to make it to grandma's safely and that the grandma seems to be alive and safe, I'm believing some of DJ's family made it to him as well. He was such a kind man and he deserved the best
I do wish we got a little more about the

Spoiler

creatures that burst out of people like how it escaped the lab, what even was the point in creating the creatures, how they got inside of people, how they would get rid of them

but reading this after reading Near the Bone it seems the author likes to leave stuff like that pretty open.
This isn't a perfect book, there was a lot I feel could've been cut down since I could glance through paragraphs and still not miss any of the major story, and it was a little slow here and there, but I was def interested in it the whole time and needed to know what would happen.

Content Warnings

kawooreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

With every Christina Henry novel I devour, I grow to love the author even more. Her ability to take fairy tales, unravel them, and re-weave into new stories is unmatched. This one, if you can't tell by the cover, is inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. Only this book is in modern times, and Red is trying to cross a plague-ridden land to get to her grandmother's house hidden in the woods, isolated from infection and vigilante survivors. This book was published in 2019, so reading about a societal collapse due to the killer "Cough" was chilling in a post-Covid world. Red is a badass, a young woman traveling through the woods with a survival pack, sharp hand-axe, and a prosthetic leg. As she comes upon survivors, she must vigilantly decide the risk of infection as well as the risk of attack. Convinced she is not a heroine, she performs some pretty heroic acts. As she gets closer to Grandma's house, she begins to gather clues as to what exactly this contagion is and why it's ripping people apart. Nothing is as it seems. I love that in this rendition, there is no damsel in distress, that Little Red Riding Hood fights the "wolves" herself! This book is horror science fiction, so the content warnings include a multitude of moments related to death, body trauma, blood, violence, grief, etc. It's not a pretty story, but it is a good one.

Content Warnings