Several weeks ago an author on Twitter called for suggestions for “radical” novels – ones that go all the way to the root of important questions or dilemmas that we face today. I suggested Elana K. Arnold’s 2020 YA novel Red Hood, a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” that explores what it means to be a woman and a man in the United States (and far too many other places in the world) today.
Told mostly in an unusual and effective second person narrative, Red Hood is the story of Bisou, whose first menstrual period at the age of 16 coincides with the mysterious death of classmate Tucker, a brutal, drunken jock widely known to sexually harass and assault girls at their high school. Upset at the blood that appears just before what would have been her first sexual experience, Bisou flees her boyfriend James’s car that night. She runs through the woods toward home and with her bare hands kills a wolf trying to attack her. Despite these strange goings-on, police rule Tucker’s death an accident. Nonetheless, brainy, socially awkward Keisha, the high school’s newspaper editor, connects his demise to a mysterious death in the same woods 40 years earlier. Keisha pursues the truth through Bisou, one of the last people to see Tucker alive, and Maggie, Tucker’s snooty but abused ex-girlfriend. Eventually, the three girls at odds with each other form a sisterhood as they come to understand that boys and men can turn into wolves. Are the boys all wolves – even James and the other boys on the basketball team?
Bisou’s attempt to understand her new powers and her past, especially the night her father hunted down and killed her mother when she was four years old, brings to her grandmother’s story, told in first person. It seems that Bisou herself is descended from the wolves. Did the choices her grandmother make expose Bisou and her mother to this vicious inheritance? Did Mémé even have a choice, or was her own power predestined by her lineage?
Readers of Red Hood will ponder these questions while becoming absorbed in the mystery of where the wolves come from and why a regular procession of violent boys and men die broken in the forests of western Washington state. Bisou and her grandmother are themselves hunted, and as the mysterious killer (as well as police and amateur investigators like Keisha) come closer to the center, we root for these fearless women and wonder whether they will be able to right the wrongs in a society that keeps making wolves. Acclaimed for her other feminist novels, including What Girls Are Made Of and Damsel, Arnold has produced an eloquent meditation on gender and power in the clothing of a page-turning thriller for teen and adult readers.
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