Little Roja Riding Hood by Susan Middleton Elya (review)

This adaptation finds Little Red as a spunky Latina girl with cowboy boots on a four-wheeler on her way to take una canasta of soup to her ill grandmother. She runs into a wolf in the forest, who convinces her to pick flowers, while he snatches her distinctive red cape. The wolf shows up at Grandma’s bedside hooded in red, and the familiar observations of his big features (“‘¡Tus dientes!’ said Grandma./‘As pointy as daggers!’”) give way to Little Red bursting in to splash scalding soup on the wolf. The rhyming couplets of the text are peppered with a great deal of Spanish vocabulary—all translated in the introductory glossary—making this a boon for bilingual classrooms. Both text and illustrations give this retelling a modern flair, with Grandma’s stucco house topped with a satellite dish and the wolf’s intrusion causing Grandma to install a security system at the book’s end. Guevara’s watercolor and gouache illustrations, scratchily outlined in ink, cheerfully play with perspective and deftly utilize the medium to evoke texture—fine lines for the wolf’s hair and stippled watercolors for satiny blouses. The wolf is personified with the addition of details such as a bandana and skull pendant necklace, and the impressionistic landscapes of the forest contrast effectively with the close-up of Grandma’s horror as the wolf prepares to attack. In addition to its pedagogical possibilities, this would also work well for intimate sharing, for younger eyes to catch recurring details of other fairy-tale mainstays—three blind mice and duendes (mischievous elves)—making this a multipurpose addition to a multicultural collection.