The Girl in Red ~ Christina Henry

Those who know me, know I love a twisted fairytale. Christina Henry is the reason I love this specific genre of books so much. I bought Lost Boy on a bit of a whim and loved it. From there, I have bought every single one of her twisted fairytale novels and haven’t been disappointed. I’m a little bit ashamed to say that The Girl in Red has sat on my shelf since the day it arrived in June, waiting for me to find time to read it. Unfortunately, it has taken six months for me to find a gap in my constantly growing reading list. However, when we decided our themes for our 2020 reading challenge and January’s was colour, I knew that this would be the book to complete that challenge.

I will one hundred per cent admit that I didn’t read the blurb until I sat down to read. I just trusted that Christina Henry would create a twisted, somehow amazing, story based on Little Red Riding Hood (can you tell how much I love Christina Henry’s stories?). 

The Girl in Red is a dystopian take on Little Red Riding Hood, where a disease called the Cough has infected the population of North America (and possibly the world) and is brutally killing those infected. Cue the zombie-apocalypse vibes. 

The main character Red (because she hates the name her mum gave her which I think is actually quite pretty), is a sci-fi, horror fan and most of her ideas and plans come from seeing movies like Alien and watching what not to do. I am this person. If I was in an apocalyptic world, my first thoughts would be about what stories had told me. Red is trying to get to her Grandmother’s cabin in the woods, away from any civilisation and the Cough. Along the way, she encounters the worst of humanity, those that arise when society falls.

If escaping the Cough and the subsequent government quarantines weren’t difficult enough, Red is also an amputee with a prosthetic leg. The leg doesn’t hold her back by any means, but it does provide some interesting challenges, things I would never have thought about being able-bodied, like balancing on hills, the care of a stump and the difficulty in getting up off the ground. 

Henry writes this novel like a horror movie, flicking between the past and the present. Usually, I’m not a fan of this sort of non-linear narrative, but in this book, it just sky-rocketed the tension. I really struggled to put this book down and not read it too quickly. I had to take my time and allow the cliffhangers of some of the chapters really sink in and try to guess what was going to happen. 

I only wish that the last chapter wasn’t so short and was a little bit more detailed. That’s probably me just wanting more, but there was one thing I wanted that didn’t happen, but it didn’t take away from the story at all. 

To put it briefly, I absolutely love Christina Henry’s twisted fairytales and The Girl in Red is no different. I give it five stars and cannot wait for Looking Glass to come out in a few months!

C🌙