Remote town or crowded city,
more “missing” young women reported,
time to hunt down the werewolves.
The first in Pearce’s Fairytale Retellings, Sisters Red takes the Little Red Riding Hood tale several steps into the present-day with chilling effectiveness.
The Atlanta-based author keeps her Retellings series firmly rooted in today’s South with Sweetly (Hansel and Gretel…and Fenris) and Fathomless (the Little Mermaid…and Fenris). Click the title links to go to my no-spoiler recommendations.
Which cover art do you prefer – the new paperback release with the hatchet or the original hardback and paperback art with the two girls’ faces and those red wolfeyes?
**kmm
Book info: Sisters Red (Fairytale Retellings #1) / Jackson Pearce. LB Teen, 2010 hardback, 2011 paperback. [author’s website] [publisher site] [book trailer]
My Recommendation: Girls are disappearing – time for Rosie and Scarlett to take up their hatchets, don their red cloaks, and hunt down the werewolves again. Perhaps the teen sisters can kill enough of these Fenris before their power becomes too strong…
Closer than twins, Scarlett and Rosie feel like they are one heart divided between two people and that they have a mission to protect people from the Fenris who slaughtered their grandmother, clawed out Scarlett’s right eye, left the March sisters selling off Oma’s things to stay afloat – hunting killer werewolves near and far leaves no time for a regular job. At least Silas is back from California, back to being their nearest neighbor out in the Georgia countryside, even if he didn’t take the traditional woodsman’s path like the rest of his family.
Attacks on young women during the Apple Time Festival reveal that outside clans of Fenris are converging on their area, and the sisters’ scan of the news tells them that Atlanta is getting hit hard. It’s Silas who suggests that they temporarily move to the city to deal with the werewolf outbreak, the three of them hunting together again to keep unwitting victims safe.
Now the trio has a whole new landscape to learn, trying to remain unseen as they stalk the leering men whose skin bursts forth into full fur when their prey has no more way to escape, the two girls donning mysterious red capes to entice the Fenris away from others and into the death trap of their hatchets and knives.
Silas insists that Rosie do something – just one thing – that’s not Fenris-related so she can keep her mind and soul together, so she tries an origami class. In the calm classroom, Rosie wonders if she’ll fight the Fenris forever, if she could have a future with Silas.
What is luring the other Fenris into territory not their own?
Can the three young people stop them?
Is there more to life than fighting away this darkness?
Told in alternating chapters by Rosie and Scarlett, Sisters Red brings an old fairytale into the here and now as the author’s home city is plagued by werewolves. (One of 6,000 books recommended on www.abookandahug.com) Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.
