It’s such a relief when the second book of an author you love turns out to be excellent.  Cruel Beauty immediately became one of my favorite books, and now that I’ve read Crimson Bound, I can trust that Rosamund Hodge is going to be an author I can trust to create beautifully haunting worlds of remade fairy tales.

I love Hodge’s darker spins on classic stories and the incredible amount of creativity she infuses into her story.  Although undeniably Little Red Riding Hood, the necessary elements of seductive danger and innocence stolen are laid on top of a rich fantasy world of sometime-France and faeries.  It is so good.

One of my favorite things about Hodge’s romances is that she refuses to play into “happily ever after” tropes where good wins and bad loses.  Although there is definitely pathos to the end of her stories, Hodge insists that there is good and bad in all of us.  It is when her characters accept their badness and cling to their goodness that the plot starts moving.  People fall in love with each other’s whole self–there is no fairy tale princess here, just broken people needing and loving each other.  This is exactly the kind of romance I like to read.

I cannot wait for her next book, and I encourage everyone to read both this and her first book, Cruel Beauty, as quickly as possible.  Continue reading →