Little Red Cowboy Hat by Susan Lowell, Randy Cecil (Illustrator), Brothers Grimm

From the Publisher

This whimsical take on Little Red Riding Hood brings new life to an old favorite.

Publishers Weekly

This Southwestern version of Little Red Riding Hood features a tomboyish main character, a wolf as sleazy as any streetcorner lothario and a distinct self-defense theme. Lowell's (The Three Little Javelinas) outwardly tough Little Red wears a sheriff's badge and shoots rattlesnakes with her slingshot. However, she's intimidated by her aggressor, who steps from behind a cactus and blocks her path ("She didn't want to talk to him, but she'd been raised to be polite"). Later, as Little Red flees the wolf in Grandma's house, Grandma bursts into the bedroom with an ax (she has been chopping wood). Together the two frontierswomen chase the wolf away, and the tale ends on an up-to-date empowerment note: " `Now, Red, have you learned your lesson?' asked Grandma. `Yep. A girl's gotta stick up for herself,' said Little Red." Cecil (Baby's Breakfast) contributes flat, angular gouache illustrations of desert scenes. He fills thin black outlines with coloring-book precision, in shades of sunset orange, oversaturated yellow and green. His light-gray wolf towers over the thin and frightened Little Red, playing up the tension Lowell builds into the text before she defuses it with Grandma's 10-gallon talk: "That yellow-bellied, snake-blooded, skunk-eyed, rancid son of a parallelogram!... This time he picked the wrong grandma." Ages 5-8. (Mar.)

Children's Literature

The brilliant colors of the Southwest suffuse this lively retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood." Cecil's gouache drawings are done in the style of TV's "Rug Rats," primitive works that look as though kids could have drawn them, yet they have enormous appeal. Little Red's name refers to her hair, "a fine color somewhere between firecrackers and new pennies," and her cowboy hat. In this version of the fairy tale, she rides her pony over to Grandma's bearing a loaf of homemade bread and a jar of cactus jelly in her saddlebag. Kids who are accustomed to the friendly woodsman saving the day will be startled by the vision of Grandma chasing the wolf away with a shotgun. The denouement is pretty nontraditional too. Grandma: "Now, Red, have you learned your lesson?" Red: "Yep. A girl's gotta stick up for herself."

School Library Journal

Gr 1-3Lowell continues her line of traditional tales repositioned on a ranch and retold in cowboy lingo. In this one, Mother warns Little Red to watch out for snakes, but of course, it's a wolf that causes the trouble. Little Red knows better than to dillydally with wolves, but she decides to string him along until she can find out what he's done with Grandma. When Grandma pops through the door with her shotgun, just in the nick of time, the two lambaste that "low-life lobo" and he goes on the lam permanently. Red's lesson is "A girl's gotta stick up for herself"with help from Grandma. Cecil's colors reflect deep western sunset shades of red and orange. Flat cartoon figures have the look of plane geometrymany of the curves are effected with short straight lines. Grandma alludes to the wolf as a "rancid son of a parallelogram," giving rise to possible math activities and art lessons. An amusing addition to the growing collection of fairy-tale spoofs.Ruth Semrau, formerly at Lovejoy School, Allen, TX

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