Christina Henry’s gutsy, compelling The Girl in Red sets the story of Little Red Riding Hood in a dark world where a mysterious illness kills off much of humanity.
The Girl in Red, the latest in author Christina Henry’s series of gritty fairytale retellings, is a dark, imaginative take on Little Red Riding Hood. This time, the story is set in a grim future where much of humanity is dead, the victims of an unknown plague.
On the surface, this is the kind of story we’ve seen before. Fairytale retellings are all the rage at the moment, after all – and everyone loves a good dystopian post-apocalyptic tale, whether you’re a YA reader or just a science fiction fan.
In this world it’s a mysterious illness known as “The Cough” and the subsequent government-mandated quarantine camps that send The Girl in Red’s heroine off to her grandmother’s house seeking both shelter and safety. The primary question of the novel isn’t just about whether or not she’ll get there – though that’s obviously kind of important – but what kind of person she’ll have to become along the way.
As befits a Red Riding Hood story, the most compelling aspect of The Girl in Red is its main character. Cordelia, who goes by Red, is a young bi-racial, bisexual woman with a prosthetic leg. She’s obsessed with horror movies and has trained herself to become a survivalist, wielding an axe with the best of them. Yet, the terror of the apocalyptic world she finds herself in – while still remembering the life of internet access and cable TV she had mere months ago – doesn’t make her monstrous in turn.
She refuses to use guns, attempts to show kindness when she can, and feels bad about every time she has to turn her axe on another human being. Yet, Red is nobody’s fool. She’s determined to survive, and to make it to her grandmother’s house in the end, somehow.
The story of The Girl in Red isn’t only about Red’s journey through the woods, however. The narrative is split into “Before” and “After” chapters, which give us glimpses of Red’s life with her family before a mysterious illness started killing people, as well as her early days on the roads.
It’s extremely horrifying – though not entirely unexpected – to see how fast humanity devolves into something monstrous, and uses the excuse of a pandemic crisis to turn on one another, particularly those they deem different for any reason.
The real miracle of this story isn’t that Red manages to survive, it’s that she manages to hang on to herself and her humanity along the way.
Red’s journey – and the choices she must make along it – is gripping stuff. She not only faces the threat of a deadly illness, but all the necessary minutiae of life. How will she find shelter? Or food? Can she trust those she meets along the road? What about the government forces doing sweeps for survivors?
In all honesty, much of this story is straight up anxiety inducing, largely because it feels as though this could all happen in our world as easily as it does on the page.
Remember the bird flu? That Ebola scare from a few years ago? What’s to keep us all from needing to find a metaphorical grandmother’s house ASAP?
Yet, The Girl in Red does offer a slim ray of hope, insisting that we can still take care of one another if we choose to, and reminding us that not all people are evil. (Even though, yes, a lot of them probably are.) This novel is a fast-paced journey from start to finish, and so stressful that you’ll probably tear through it in just a few sittings.
In fact, the story is so compelling that its abrupt ending is a bit disappointing. Because in many ways, it feels almost as though the story just… stops, rather than reaches a natural endpoint.
There are many answers we never discover, and several main plot points aren’t so much resolved as just accepted. And, while this may accurately reflect real life – we don’t always know the reason behind the terrible things that happen – it’s not the sort of conclusion readers particularly want in a novel.
The story spends so much time building up suspense and fear around several of these unresolved plot threads that you basically end up with a lot of stress that basically has nowhere to go.
That said, this is still a story well worth reading. In a sea of dystopian and/or survivalist tales, The Girl in Red stands out because of its fierce female protagonist, its realistic world building that looks disturbingly similar to our own, and its dedication to the idea that the monsters we should probably most fear are things that live in our real world now.
The Girl in Red is on sale in bookstores everywhere.