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. ( )

CW: Gore, death of loved ones, implied rapes

2.5 Stars

Where did the rest of the book go? It doesn’t say there is a sequel. It just stopped. Not in a styley mind-blowing cliffhanger way. It literally just stopped mid action. I can see the stars falling away as I type.

I love re-imaginings and relocating Little Red Riding Hood to a U.S.A devastated by an apocalypse was an exciting twist on an already dark tale. The first chapter delivered the dark and gritty world I was looking forward to being scared witless in. And then I read chapter two. Red is not a particularly likeable character. Yes, this is a very stressful situation but I thought her supposedly sassy personality was a tad annoying. I appreciated her survival skills and instincts, however I am not a fan of ‘know-it-alls’, no matter how well they wield an axe. Red is a freakishly knowledgeable prepper who is constantly reminding us of how much of a freakishly knowledgeable prepper she is. Apparently movies and books are good preparation for surviving the apocalypse. To be fair, The Walking Dead has shown me how to dispatch zombies quickly and efficiently. So thank you Rick Grimes. Consider me prepared.

Humans don’t come off too well in this world. It appears that we should be expecting a lot of raping, dog eat dog behaviour, and brutality to occur in an apocalypse. I think this is a case of building a book wholly around a character to the detriment of developing the world that she is fighting her way through. As a stand alone I would have expected to come away knowing more about the Alien-esque creatures and an idea of how the apocalypse would pan out for Red. There are lots of great 'fighting for survival scenes' and what little world building that existed was really good. Just okay for me. ( )