A Grim Fairy Tale: The Girl in Red

The Girl in Red (2019)
Written by: Christina Henry
Genre: Fairy Tale/Folklore Retelling, Post-apocalyptic Fiction
Pages: 292 (Paperback)
Publisher: Berkley

Why I Chose It: I first heard about The Girl in Red when the Speculative Chic editor posted about it, but I am a huge fan of revamped fairly tales. What really sealed the deal for me was the book’s amazing cover. A girl in a red sweatshirt holding an axe walks across the back of an enormous wolf with glowing red eyes. The wolf actually reminds me of my German shepherd mix, Ellie, although she lacks the demonic eyes.

The premise:

From the national bestselling author of Alice comes a postapocalyptic take on the perennial classic “Little Red Riding Hood”…about a woman who isn’t as defenseless as she seems.

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….

Mild spoilers ahead.

Discussion: I wish this book had been published last year while I was completing my resolution to read more diverse books because the main character, Red, is biracial, bisexual, and has a prosthetic leg. At twenty, she is older than the Little Red Riding Hood of the fairy tale. The different facets of Red’s identity are handled well within the context of the larger story. We don’t find out that she had a girlfriend until 200 pages into the book. Red describes herself as having “that indeterminate mixed-race look that made white people nervous, because they didn’t know what box to put her in. She might be half African or Middle Eastern. She might be a Latina or maybe she was just a really dark Italian” (p. 3). One of the more depressing (yet probably realistic) parts of this story is that racism continues to be a factor, even while the world is ending.

Finding books that feature characters with disabilities is difficult, and Red’s prosthetic leg makes this post-apocalyptic tale unique. She lost the leg in a car accident years before a virus known as the Cough starts killing off huge numbers of people. People, especially her family, underestimate Red because of her leg but she is tough and capable. Her disability gives Red the grit that she needs to survive, but it is also makes it incredibly difficult for her to hike the hundreds of miles to her grandma’s house.

From the very start of the book, we know that something has gone horribly wrong. Red is alone in the woods with some terribly unsavory characters, trying desperately to reach the safety of her grandmother’s house, which is safer because it is off the grid. In the flashbacks, Red is the cherished daughter of two professors with an immature but beloved older brother. This is a dark and violent book that has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than any fairy tale that Disney ever produced. Red is the one wielding the axe and it gets put to gruesome use. There are glimpses of humanity but overall, this is one grim fairy tale.

Red is more prepared for the apocalypse than the other characters because she is a horror fan, which makes it all the more ironic that the book treads some extremely familiar post-apocalyptic territory. Government rounding people up and keeping dark secrets? Check. Characters foolishly exposing themselves to infection? Check. Other survivors murdering people for no apparent reason? Check. Orphaned children showing up to give the protagonist a reason to keep fighting? Check. There is also a crazy twist about the crisis that comes way out of left field and is never fully explained.

In conclusion: Little Red Riding Hood survives the apocalypse is an intriguing premise but The Girl in Red feels like a post-apocalyptic story that has been told many times before. I did find it refreshing that the main character has a disability but is portrayed as being tough, resilient, and often more competent than the other characters. Christina Henry has written other fairy tale-inspired books, Alice and Red Queen, each based on Alice in Wonderland, and Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook. I did enjoy The Girl in Red well enough that I may try her other books.