After reading the Cloaked in Red, I felt a strong urge to revisit one of my favorite Red Riding Hood retellings, contained in this volume. Of course, then I got sucked in, and had to reread the whole thing...
For those not familiar with this series, it's a set of vignettes told by Annabelle, a rag doll who has wandered through a variety of fairy tales, legends, and horror stories. For the first time, she's able to communicate with her owner, a little girl named Gwen. The stories in this book are tales that Annabelle shares with Gwen, and one of Gwen's own adventures as well. The fairy tale retellings are of course my favorites: Little Red Riding Hood comes from a family of werewolves, but doesn't know it; and Beauty and the Beast were lovers in the past, before they were separated by Belle's cruel father. But the rest of the stories (ghost stories, all) are very effective, and range in tone from the sweet love story between a girl in 1920s New Orleans and the ghost of a young man, to the terrible haunting of a woman in 1940s New England, driven mad by the ghost of her husband's first wife. This is probably my favorite volume in the series, and that last that uses the fairy tale format before the story changes theme and tone in the third volume. Highly recommended if you're looking for great storytelling and you don't mind some horror elements and violence.
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