Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold | ARC Review

I Still Don’t Quite Know What I Read or How I Feel About It

The Highlights:

• not really sure what I read
• violence used against violence didn’t sit right with me
• fantastic family and friend relationships
• second person PoV is tough

I had no expectations going into Red Hood, being the first book by Arnold I read, and after reading it I’m still not sure what I wanted to get out of it. Told in second person PoV (more on that later), the book follows Bisou in a commentary on the violence of men and masculine toxicity, and the power of women and female friendships.

My initial struggles were connected to the writing style. Second person point of view isn’t common for a reason and tends to be one of those PoVs where I’m either in it or I’m not. It took a while before I got into the groove of Red Hood and I think the other side of that came from this book’s tendency to be “shocking.”

Or at least I felt like that was the goal.

Some of the scenes, especially in the beginning, came off as though the author intended to shock the reader, to make them pay attention. Where I see most books shy away from even mentioning menstruation in passing, Arnold deep dives into the nitty gritty details. That didn’t bother me, but the “shock value” of those scenes definitely made me wonder where the book was going to go.

From there, we follow Bisou as she navigates being a teen with a traumatic past filled with abuse and murder. She has the loving support of her grandmother, which was a relationship I really loved seeing on the page, and comes to form strong bonds of friendship with some of her classmates. And that’s like half the plot.

The other half is filled with murder and masculine violence toward women. So really, there wasn’t much of a plot. I felt like Red Hood wove in and out of men doing bad things and the consequences being their death, and a group of young women finding satisfaction in abandoning morality to tackle this issue where nothing really changes. We see that in flashbacks to Bisou’s mother and stories from her grandmother. Violent/abusive men turn into wolves and they hunt the wolves, but the system doesn’t change, we don’t know what makes a wolf and what doesn’t, or why Bisou’s family can sense them and only while they have their period.

I read the last scene and then… the book just ended. The scene itself, while I won’t go into details, didn’t give me the satisfaction as a reader that I was looking for. I didn’t feel that sense of closure I want in a standalone novel. It just ends. And you’re left in a haze of “what did I just read.”

Maybe that was the intention, to make you think with the thin veil of a story. But I don’t think I got from Red Hood what was intended. I read a story of violence, which wasn’t an issue, but it was violence in response to other violence. An almost mechanical response because I didn’t feel the emotion behind it. And that’s not to be insensitive toward those who have undergone trauma due to toxic masculinity. It is in the way it’s presented in Red Hood, where the message didn’t sit the way I expected, I suppose is the best way to put it. It never felt right that only some of the men were punished or that they were killed in an almost emotionless way (at least that’s how it came off the page). I agree with some form of punishment but… I don’t know. The killing didn’t seem to actually fix anything because the cycle continued.

But clearly this book did make me think and left me with a lot of tangled thoughts at the end. I will say it didn’t take me long to actually read it, but the desire to pick it up ebbed and flowed depending on where I left off last. I think it’s one of those books that tends to be a bit more polarizing when it comes to reader opinions but I fall somewhere in the middle. I’m not sure I would recommend it, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t either. It depends on the kind of reader you are and what you’re looking for.

Though I suppose this means I should check out the author’s other work now…