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A review by lesserjoke
Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold
4.0
A dark and gory feminist tale, perfect for the chilly weather and dimmer evenings we're getting now at the tail end of the year. It's a loose retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, where the girl in the woods is a teenager going home to her grandmother's house after a homecoming dance, and when she manages to kill the wolf that attacks her, its corpse transforms into the naked body of a boy from school. And he's not the only one out there.
What follows is a brutal look at male violence and entitlement, made stronger by the late reveal that even in a supernatural setting, not all of the villains are werewolves. Some threats stay stubbornly human in form, and so are harder to dispatch. (There are good men here too, just to clarify, but they're not the focus of the story.)
Although not initially sold on the second-person point-of-view -- or the graphic descriptions of sex and menstruation -- I've ended up drawn in by the immediacy of the text and author Elana K. Arnold's clear talent for poetical prose. Certain readers may object that the novel is a celebration of vigilante justice, but as the protagonist herself says: "It’s not that we need more wolf hunters. It's that we need men to stop becoming wolves." The very fact that I wasn't sure this book was for me practically demanded that I sit with that discomfort and keep reading, and I'm ultimately quite glad I did.
[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, death of a parent, MRA/incel rhetoric, slut-shaming, and sexual assault/rape.]
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter
What follows is a brutal look at male violence and entitlement, made stronger by the late reveal that even in a supernatural setting, not all of the villains are werewolves. Some threats stay stubbornly human in form, and so are harder to dispatch. (There are good men here too, just to clarify, but they're not the focus of the story.)
Although not initially sold on the second-person point-of-view -- or the graphic descriptions of sex and menstruation -- I've ended up drawn in by the immediacy of the text and author Elana K. Arnold's clear talent for poetical prose. Certain readers may object that the novel is a celebration of vigilante justice, but as the protagonist herself says: "It’s not that we need more wolf hunters. It's that we need men to stop becoming wolves." The very fact that I wasn't sure this book was for me practically demanded that I sit with that discomfort and keep reading, and I'm ultimately quite glad I did.
[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, death of a parent, MRA/incel rhetoric, slut-shaming, and sexual assault/rape.]
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter