But Who's the Wolf??????

Just finished Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's Red Riding Hood and I am not amused!  I had, I guess unreasonably, high hopes for this adaptation of the classic fairytale.  Alas, I was let down.  The story was interesting and kept me involved, however I felt completely let down by so much of the book.

Hood follows the experience of Valerie and the village she lives in.  Every full moon a family must sacrifice one piece of their livestock to appease the werewolf who haunts their village.  One fateful harvest there is the rarely occurring blood moon.  This is where all the action starts.  There is a vicious killing of one of the villagers and, literally, all hell breaks loose.  The one killing leads to broken loyalties, paranoia, questions of faith, and more deaths.  Of course there is also a love triangle between Valerie, Henry, and Peter that plays into the action of the story, but the reader doesn't have to think hard to know who Valerie will end up with.  It's a decent storyline, right?

But then things go all wonky.  There are loose ends that are never tied up.  The identity of the werewolf is never truly revealed.  The ending leaves a ton of questions for the reader.  There were incongruities with some of the plot lines and some sequences of action did not add up.  That's what disappointed me so much.  Overall, it was a quick read and, though it left me a little frustrated, it wasn't absolutely atrocious.  Meh.

The last page in the book tells you to go to a website to see if this is truly the end of Valerie's story, so, naturally, I visited the website.  It offered another chapter that was very abrupt (didn't match up to how the book actually ended) and then reveals who the werewolf is.  I still didn't find it convincing. 

  I still want to see the movie even though I heard it wasn't very good.  I do know, based on the Preface, that the book was writing solely based on the screenplay and that the finished movie veers away from that.  So...