Customer Reviews

Little Red Riding Hood

5 star:		(3)
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I enjoyed the story as Perrault wrote it, not as yet another alternate version with yet another happy ending. Red Riding Hood, also available in French as Le Petit Rouge, contains marvelous photos by Sarah Moon which lend an eerie, appropriately menacing mood to an already dark tale. It should be said, however, that this book is unsettling and is undoubtedly not one to share with your child as a bedtime story.

Fans of artistic photo books for kids will find this an intriguing contemporary treatment of the Red Riding Hood classic. Here a little country girl faces urban and rural threats on her way to grandmother's house, only to find her grandmother has been replaced by an evil wolf. The sad ending for Riding Hood is dramatic and revealing, providing a realistic twist on the fairy tale.

"Little Red Riding Hood?" you say. "The children's book?" Yes, the very one -- and yet, not the same story at all. The words are Perrault's but Moon, a highly inventive photographer, recasts the story with her images of a little girl running along the streets of a darkened city, caught in the headlights of a car, getting undressed to climb into bed with her supposed grandmother. The book only runs a little over thirty pages, but the subtext is a powerful modern fable.