Book Talk: Crimson Bound

I've always been drawn to adaptations, and my latest read is no exception. I was initially introduced to Rosamund Hodge through her first novel, Cruel Beauty, which I talked about here. I was absolutely in love with both the cover art and the premise - an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast - and I gobbled it up in one afternoon. So when I heard that Hodge's latest novel, Crimson Bound, was an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood,* I knew I had to read it.  

Crimson Bound was an entirely different experience for me than Cruel Beauty. While I was familiar with both the tale of Beauty and the Beast and the allusions to Greek mythology, I was much less familiar with the tale of Little Red Riding Hood or the allusions to historic France, so I felt like I didn't pick up on as many of the little nuances in Crimson Bound that I loved so much in Cruel Beauty. 

That being said, I really enjoyed Crimson Bound. The world Hodge's develops is deeper and darker than the one in Cruel Beauty, and I felt like the structure of the novel paralleled the plot in a lot of ways.

As a reader, I was being drawn into the story just like Rachelle** was being drawn into the woods. There were times where I felt I had been drawn in so far that I didn't know where things would go from there, and then events began unfolding for me at the same time that they unfolded for her - I think this lack of predictability was due to a) my lack of knowledge about the source material and b) the author's skill in not simply adapting this story, but making it her own. I liked her non-literal adaptation of certain elements - particularly the idea of what it means to be consumed by the evil lurking in the woods. Overall, I really enjoyed this second go round with Rosamund Hodge's fairy tale adaptations, and I'm looking forward to any and all books that may come from her in the future. Are there any other litarary adaptations I should be reading? Let me know down below!

*according to the acknowledgments, Crimson Bound is an amalgamation of Little Red Riding Hood and The Girl with No Hands, which is a story I've never even heard of before, and I'm definitely going to look into it - I love it when books pique my interest in other books! 

**I was repeatedly distracted by the pronunciation of the protagonist's name - Rachel or Ra-chelle? I couldn't decide what the author's intention was here, and it drove me crazy!!