Book# 16

Red Riding Hood by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
324 pages
Popular Fiction
This book is being made into a movie right now staring Amanda Seyfried. It is really weird but REALLY good! It follows the basics of Little Red Riding Hood: the red cloak, Grandmother, the Wolf, a woodsman. It is more for teens than little kids because of the violent images.
The story starts with a village and two sisters, Valerie and Lucie. The town is plagued by a wolf but as long as they make an animal sacrifice each month then the wolf will leave them alone. The girls are of marrying age and there is a festival for the harvest were boys from other towns come to harvest and maybe choose a wife. The girls and their friends are trying to impress the boys to get a good husband. All except Valerie, she is attracted to the mysterious boy who resembles a childhood friend, Peter, whose family was kicked out of the village. After the Harvest the girls camp out on one side of the river and the boys on the other. You can guess what happens next, the girls boat over to the boys side. Here Valerie meets up with Peter and separates from the others. But when the Wolf attacks the camp everyone scatters and gets separated. The next morning a boy finds Lucie dead torn up by the Wolf. Valerie and Peter get stopped from running away when they hear the four bells signaling a Wolf kill. Valerie is distraught and finds out that she is engaged to someone who is not Peter, a blacksmith named Henry. The townspeople decide they want the wolf gone and the men go out to hunt it but when one of them comes back dead, the priest calls in professionals. These men do horrid things: accuse a handicapped boy of knowing the wolf and killing him, accusing Valerie of witchcraft, trying to sacrifice Valerie to the Wolf, and many more bad things. I have only a few more chapters until I have finished the whole book and I am on edge. I can't decide whether the wolf is Peter, Henry, or Grandma.
I love this retelling of this classic story it brings a whole new side of it out.