Red Hood

About Red Hood

Red Hood is a 2020 novel by Elana K. Arnold, published by Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins). It is a feminist retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" that uses the bones of the fairy tale to examine what it means to be a girl in a world that sees female bodies as vulnerable, available, and ownable.

Bisou Martel has been raised by her grandmother since she was four years old. She is a good student, careful and contained. Then one night, leaving a party, she is attacked in the woods — and something changes. She survives, but by the time she gets home, she is carrying more than a wound. What follows is a story of transformation: of power discovered in the body, of inherited protection passing from women to women across generations, and of a girl learning to stop apologizing for what she is.

Arnold's prose is dense and unflinching. The novel includes explicit depictions of menstruation, bodily transformation, and violence. It addresses sexual assault without euphemism. It situates all of these things within the traditional imagery of fairy tale — the woods, the hood, the wolf — to argue that these stories have always been about the real dangers girls face, and that it is time to stop softening them.

Awards and Critical Acclaim

Red Hood received five starred reviews from major trade publications, including Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Arnold previously won the Printz Honor Award for Damsel, another revisionist fairy tale that interrogates gendered violence. With Red Hood, she pushed further in the same direction.

The book has been widely praised in YA literary circles and holds a place in ongoing critical conversations about body horror, feminist fiction, and what fairy tale retelling can accomplish that straight realistic fiction cannot.

Why It Has Been Banned

Red Hood has been banned or challenged in 36 school districts across multiple states. Challenges most frequently cite its explicit content — including frank depictions of menstruation and sexual violence — and its overall treatment of the female body.

The irony of banning a book about how female experience gets erased is not lost on its defenders. Arnold has written about the challenges publicly, noting that the very topics that make the book controversial — bodily autonomy, sexual assault, the refusal to treat female experience as shameful — are topics that young women have every right to read about honestly.

Educators and librarians who have championed the book argue that it offers teenage girls something rare: a narrative in which their bodies are not something to be ashamed of, their anger is not something to be suppressed, and their survival is not measured by how quietly they endure. Those are precisely the qualities that make it worth defending.