A Gripping and Unforgettable Journey

Christina Henry's The Girl in Red is a magnificent and captivating work of literature that captured my attention and emotions from the first page. This gritty, dystopian adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood carries you on an arduous, five-star adventure that you will not wish to terminate.



The Girl in Red ♦ Christina Henry

Opinion

Christina Henry has created a terrifyingly distinct yet eerily familiar environment. Her writing skill and relentless tension combine to create a tale that is a perfect storm of emotion, terror, and unadulterated humanity. She creates a visceral and evocative post-apocalyptic setting, and Red, her protagonist, is a wonderfully complicated figure who defies the expectations of a conventional heroine.

I was captivated by Red's dangerous trip into a world full of unimaginable atrocities as soon as I started reading it. She is an inspirational figure because of her intelligence, fortitude, and tenacity in the face of unbelievable odds. It's truly amazing how well Henry was able to capture Red's essence.

The suspense and mood of the story are evident as you turn page after page with apprehension, eager to find out what is around the next dark corner. Christina Henry writes with a razor's edge, a vivid sense of place, and a wealth of provocative ideas on morality, human nature, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Conclusion

The Girl in Red delves deeply into themes of identity, survival, and familial ties. You will continue to be moved by this story long after you have turned the last page. I firmly believe that Henry has written a contemporary masterpiece, and anyone searching for an engrossing and remarkable read should pick up this book. It deserves every honor it gets; five stars are not enough to do it right.


This review was first published on The Art of Reading. ( )

A disabled, mixed-race, 20yr-old girl with a prosthetic leg is determined to survive a deadly pandemic and is travelling cross-country to get to her grandmother's rural house where she might be safe. ( )

"She asks if he talks to me. I tell her the truth: yes, or more like he chats—because he talks less and less, he’s disappearing into the Internet; Marco is letters that titillate, and sometimes he just disappears without waiting for an answer—but that he never tells me what’s going on, what he’s feeling, what he wants."

I tagged it horror but maybe only half the stories fit into what you'd typically call horror - most are realist with only a quick encounter with something maybe supernatural, or the intrusion of the very real horrors of real life. I came into it with the wrong expectations because of the genre tag but as I got used to it I found it compelling. Quite a few stories not only lack resolution but even a sense of what exactly happened - we get a dip into the other side, the terrifying stuff that underpins middle class normality, but we only get to see the horror from the edges. There are very obvious constant reoccurring themes - great poverty and slums, the class divide, the legacy of the dictatorships (including Paraguay), the oppression of women (all of these stories are told from the perspective of women). Even when the themes are obvious and the "horror" level isn't that strong, all the stories are properly creepy and stick with you. It brings up your uneasiness around the things you can't quite see, that are bred from capitalism and the patriarchy and have to be suppressed and fenced out in case they take you. Great writing. ( )

I really wish I'd read what this was about before beginning haha.

I liked the story, the retelling of Red Riding Hood was a great conveyance for this story. I loved the way Ms. Henry included LOADS of minorities within this character. ( )

Having read all of Christina's previous books -- which i've extremely enjoyed -- i had very high hopes for this book: alas, it was not to be.

So "Red", our protagonist and narator, is on a journey to her Grandma's house across several hundred miles of the USA after a coughing plague has culled nearly all the people: basically it's a post-apocalyptic survival story.

And the whole book is taken up with the first half of this journey until there's an endoparasitoid-bursting-out-the-chest-thing -- WTF!!!   Remember Alien and Sigourney Weaver?   Yeah, that's what an endoparasitoid-bursting-out-the-chest-thing is.

The army turn up and the soldier guy who chases the endoparasitoid-bursting-out-the-chest-things admits to Red that the government made it in a lab.   He lets Red carry on with her journey instead of taking her to the quarantine camp, and in a few pages Red arrives at her Grandma's.   It's like the second half of Red's journey didn't happen, like she was just magically transported to her Grandma's.   And no explanation as to the endoparasitoid and why the government would make such a thing.

And it's this one single, silly, ridiculous idea of an endoparasitoid thrown into the story with no purpose whatsoever that completely ruins the book -- and also the second half of Red's journey being skipped over as though it didn't really happen, or was in a completely different world to the first half.

We don't even get to know how Grandma has been surviving or anything.

Basically, the ending is utter garbage and totally ruins the whole story.   It's just a total nonsensical ending.

It just left me which such a disappointment.   This is far below Christina's usual standard.

Ho hum: i suppose we all have to write something crap once in a while. ( )