Red Riding Hood
Author: Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Series: ---
Publisher: Poppy
How Received: review copy
The blacksmith would marry her.
The woodcutter would run away with her.
The werewolf would turn her into one of its own.
Valerie's sister was beautiful, kind, and sweet. Now she is dead. Henry, the handsome son of the blacksmith, tries to console Valerie, but her wild heart beats fast for another: the outcast woodcutter, Peter, who offers Valerie another life far from home.
After her sister's violent death, Valerie's world begins to spiral out of control. For generations, the Wolf has been kept at bay with a monthly sacrifice. But now no one is safe. When an expert Wolf hunter arrives, the villagers learn that the creature lives among them--it could be anyone in town.
It soon becomes clear that Valerie is the only one who can hear the voice of the creature. The Wolf says she must surrender herself before the blood moon wanes...or everyone she loves will die.
I have nothing against Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. If anything, I give her props for writing this; it's hard to write a book based on a movie, and she was on set every day, interacting in attempts to get the details right. Her writing isn't bad.
It's just a matter of trying to be the next Twilight, which is all I could think of during the 88 pages of the book I managed to get through. And it doesn't do that.
Where the movie had a ton of cheesy romance, I like to think the focus was on the mystery of who the Wolf was. Even though the romance and the set up took up a good forty minutes to an hour of the movie, the suspense of the Wolf was woven into every minute. We follow only Valerie and don't know more than she does. We're as confused as she is.
This didn't happen in the book. Since scenes have been added in to show what happens between the scenes of the movie, we get more story - and lose much of the suspense in the process. There's little incentive to think that the Wolf is even important, except for the fact that he's thrown casually into the conversation once every chapter, as if a reminder not to forget that he's out there, ready to nom on our flesh. Not only that, but occasionally the view point will flash away from Valerie to another character - a random chapter of Peter, a paragraph of her mother.
Then there's the writing itself. Now, I'm not saying Sarah is a bad writer - she's not. I'll reiterate what I said before - I feel like this is an attempt to be another Twilight. Every detail of everything is described, and yet Valerie is still oblivious to herself and the actions around her for the most part. She's not described besides having "green eyes" and being so thin that I had to make an experiment about it. A girl who doesn't think she's pretty has two different boys slobbering all over him - one mysterious, one everybody's favorite ball of sunshine. Her friends are petty, but seem perfectly normal to me.
And then there's sections like this bit that just make you groan with the level of cheese - a scene, I might add, that starts the movie but doesn't have these lines in it. (This is page 88, the page that I stopped reading on.)
"You'd leave your home? Your family? Your whole life?"
"I-I think I would. Anything to be with you." She heard herself saying it and realized it was true.
"Anything?"
Valerie pretended to think for a moment, for show, to be able to tell herself she had.
Then, almost meekly, "Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
And cue my explosions as I tossed the book aside and reached for Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
Honestly, if you like Twilight, you'll probably like this.
But it's too similar to make me do anything but headdesk.
Final Comments: I feel like Poppy (which is a division of Little, Brown - Twilight's publisher) was trying to make the next Twilight, and that was a mistake. From the movie, the story itself had potential, but with what I read, the book never lived up to it.
Book or movie?: I just blogged about this the other day, but movie. At least I wanted to know who the Wolf was in the movie; here, I didn't care about what was going on at all.
Has anybody else read it? What do you think of it? I want to hear your opinion.