Review: Little Bad Wolf and Red Riding Hood by Bruce Lansky and Timothy Tocher

Little Bad Wolf and Red Riding Hood by Timothy Tocher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars






Hi Everyone.
Well this week we’re moving from Mysteries (don’t worry they’ll be back) over to the Tall Tales, or in this case, fairy tales.
There is a popular trend in books with the retelling of fairy tales. It’s been around for a while, are you old enough to remember the Fractured Fairy Tales from the original Bullwinkle and Rocky Show? If you not just a do an internet search, they were really fun. The fun is still around although others take it really seriously. The good guys are the bad guys, the bad guys are really good guys or at least they had a good reason for being bad so that counts as being a good guy, the good guys and bad guys are zombies…ZOMBIES?!
Zombies? Really? Fairy tales weren’t creepy enough in the first place, with evil queens wanting to eat princesses’ hearts, granny eating wolves, giants grinding bones to make their bread and such that they had to go to zombies? On second thought, maybe that isn’t such a big leap. Fairy tales aren’t exactly Disney in their original forms.
Still new entry of the list of the things I do not do, I do not do zombies! Creepy is one thing, gross is quite another. Sorry zombie lovers.
Zombies, brrr.
Moving on this particular fairy tale retelling is a sample story called Little Bad Wolf and Red Riding Hood by Bruce Lansky and Timothy Tocher.
In this version of Little Red Riding Hood we have L.B. (short for Little Bad) Wolf trying to locate his missing father Big Bad Wolf. His mother doesn’t want him to go after his father, having had relatives who had issues with Three Little Pigs and a boy named Peter, but like all youngsters L.B. ignores his mother and is off to track his father down. Kids, they know everything. He runs into a little girl who turns out to have been the last person to see his father. She’s called Red Riding Hood, so named due to her mother taking advantage of a fabric sale and being determined to use every scrap of the yardage, much to her daughter’s dismay. Who know fabric sales could be so ruinous to a child’s self-esteem? Anyway Big Bad apparently went off to Red’s granny’s house and now Red is taking goodies to granny every day. L.B., after some negotiation, takes Red’s place, and her goodies, and is off to granny’s to see what has become of his errant father.
SPOILER: No grannies or girls wearing unfortunate red clothing are eaten during the course of this story! And there are no Zombies either, which is just as well as I don’t do zombies. Oh right, I already covered that.
Anyway it’s a fun little story, especially the 1, 2 Thousand (read the book if you want to know what it means). Also being a sample book it gives you the idea of what the full book New Fangled Fairy Tales is about, where other fairy tale classics get the same humorous treatment.
I liked it and maybe you will too.
Unless you were expecting zombies.





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