Eight Ways Red

AT FIRST, it might seem like an impossible task. Take Little Red Riding Hood, and rewrite it eight different times for the toughest of audiences: young adult readers, who will straight up tell you if they think your book sucks. Each time, keep the story interesting, and familiar in good ways, but unpredictable in terms of plot. Each time say something new. Switch it up. Vivian Vande Velde’s short story collection Cloaked in Red manages to succeed at this complex task, opening a classic story into a series of fun, new tales.

Velde starts the collection with an author’s note that helps young readers think about the basic elements of story, such as character and plot. In this introduction, she playfully compares the different versions of Little Red Riding Hood, highlighting some of the gruesome details of its scarier renditions — you know, that rated R version where Grandma and Little Red are trapped in the wolf, before the woodcutter carves them out of his stomach. Or that part where Grandma and Granddaughter proceed to stuff the wolf’s stomach with stones, before sewing him back up.

“What makes a good story?” Velde asks before she breaks it down for the reader with a list of important components: memorable characters, a vivid setting, an exciting plot, and important themes. And why do we keep telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood to generations of kids? What makes these new generations eager each time to listen? There must be something about traveling into woods, something about ending up in the wolf’s mouth. These beginning pages are a delightful way to teach young readers not only how to approach Velde’s collection of stories, but any book they happen to get their hands on. (Velde’s careful formulations would, I think, make this collection helpful for classroom teachers trying to reinforce some Common Core standards.)

Velde does something else very clever for her young adult audience. If fairy tales are a way to warn us of danger and to reflect certain cultural anxieties, then Velde’s collection seems to suggest that we need new fairy tales, or new adaptations of them, that reveal how annoying it is to be “saved” by all of the woodsmen in our lives. In one story, the grandmother is persistently harassed by an over “helpful” suitor named Gladwyn, who keeps on knocking on her door as she tries to nurse a hurt wolf back to health in her bedroom. Velde writes, “She [the grandmother] knew that Gladwyn would break in if he had to, in order to prove himself helpful.”

In Velde’s universe of Little Red Riding Hoods, there are stories in which Little Red is more wolf than girl and tales that subvert the sweet defenseless granny trope. In fact, in these stories, sometimes even Grandmothers are wolves, and little lost girls have secret powers.

While some stories in this collection are slower than others, overall this book is a pleasure I would definitely scoop up and teach to my kids. It’s worth pushing past the collection’s off-putting cover — which features a blond twenty-something-year-old woman made to look as if she’s fifteen, staring harshly into the camera. It’s a little bit like something you might see on a bad television show about teenage vampires. But do not be deceived! The stories are good, and Cloaked in Red would start wonderful conversations with young readers about the power of fairy tales. Perhaps it would even prompt them to write their own.

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Claire Jimenez is a graduate of Vanderbilt University's MFA program in fiction. She teaches and writes in New York.