Nice, entertaining read. I liked the fact that the heroine stood up for herself. Hero tried his best not to fall in love with the heroine, but he was fighting an already lost battle. It was a little bit repetitive.

Very cute, sweet, believable. Loved the setting: 1900s Maine and New York City. Recommended read.

5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. I’ve read so many of this author’s fairytale retellings years ago, but I somehow missed this one.

I loved it. It follows the Red Riding Hood fairytale’s main theme pretty closely, I felt. Setting is in a mountainous area of Maine and at some points New York City.

The hero, Wolf, was a perfect old school hero. His original plan was to get pestering NYC society mamas off of his back, so he decided to get married, get her pregnant, ship her off to his mountain castle home in Maine, while he would stay in NYC to carry on his rakish scoundrel ways.

He picks our heroine to be the candidate of his grand plan as he encounters her in the forest while she’s walking to her grandmothers house. This heroine was the classic ‘sunshine’. She saw only the good in the hero, was immediately enchanted by the hero, and secretly fell in love pretty quickly.

Well… the hero accidentally becomes fascinated by the heroine as well… and his whole grand plan gets slowly ruined.

I loved watching the hero slowly realize that he liked her company, to then missing her, to needing her to then eventually acknowledging loving her. We get to see it happen thru the whole book, so many feels!!

The only holdback I have to giving this a Keeper status… when the heroine overhears the hero making inappropriate comments that deeply hurt her, I felt she forgave him way too easily and quickly. I wanted her to be a bit more pissed off. I would have been more pissed off by that overheard conversation than ‘the test’ he put her thru with his friend.

Review originally posted at Under the Moonlight Book Blog

I love what Linda Jones has done with all this fairy tale retelling mixed with historical romance. Two of my favorite things together. The retelling of children books with an adult twist and my favorite genre, historical romance.

Molly is on her way to visit her sick grandmother when she comes across a stranger that steps out of the woods. She is drawn to this stranger and feels no fear even when she realizes is Wolf Trevelyan, a man that has a dark past and who no one wants near their innocent female women.

Wolf feels this inexplicable pull to Molly and he needs to have her no matter the cost. What he can't explain is why she doesn't behave like any other woman he knows and why he can't buy her into her bed. Everyone has a price, he just needs to find hers.

I fell in love with this book since the first encounter between Molly and Wolf. The way Wolf was puzzled by Molly, the way Molly treated him in spite of the rumors, the way Wolf kept trying to look for an explanation as to why Molly was different, and the way Molly followed her instincts instead of what people said.

Even their time in New York at which point the story deviated from the Red Ridinghood story was fascinating and engaging and infuriating and so many more things that capture my attention and hold it firmly. I will, of course, be reading more of this stories the next one being Someone's Been Sleeping In My Bed since I was gifted that book too.

Sweet and heartfelt but not for me. Listia, here it comes. =)

This retelling of Little Red Riding Hood holds up very well. The bones of they story are literal but the push and pull felt current. The sexy times are tame compared to most 2022 books but overall, there is not anything cringey.

It was a great little, I different take on the big bad wolf.

A fairytale retelling AND it’s a non-British historical? Sign me up. For this month’s TBR Challenge, I went old school with a 1997 historical romance set in 1890s Maine. Big Bad Wolf is a deliciously sexy take on Little Red Riding Hood that held up pretty well for me.

There’s a mansion overlooking the Maine woods and its owner, Wolf Trevelyan, is pretty much the local bogeyman. Rumor has it he killed his first wife on their wedding night, and he’s stayed safely away from Maine ever since. He reportedly lives a life of debauchery in New York, and the folks in the local small town have largely forgotten he even owns property out there.

Molly Kincaid lives a simple life with her widowed mother. Mrs. Kincaid works hard taking in laundry and doing some of the smaller jobs open to a single woman in a rural town of that day. Molly’s life isn’t fancy, but she’s content living with her mother and taking provisions out to her grandmother’s cottage every day or so. Naturally, she has a lovely hooded red cape.

Things change when Molly heads out to her grandmother’s one day and meets up with Wolf in the woods. Wolf clearly has fun toying flirtatiously with Molly. It’s apparent that he intended to be scary or at least off-putting, but sensible Molly meets him head-on. Wolf finds himself intrigued and this starts a series of flirty meetings in the woods. Molly knows the stories about Wolf, but having met him, she’s (correctly) convinced that there must be more to the story.

It’s certainly believable that the sheltered Molly would develop a crush on Wolf. And Wolf finds himself so obsessed with Molly that he can’t get her out of his mind. He proposes to make her a kept woman and Molly turns him down flat. Eventually Wolf proposes marriage, and we are off to the races.

This is a partial review. You can find the complete text here: https://allaboutromance.com/tbr-chall...

Haha, so the H in this story was a colossal jerk. He would be really good in traditional bodice-ripper.

Overall, I enjoyed it, because it had one of my favorite tropes - marriage of convenience with H being the reluctant party.

This was a great little light read. It is both amusing and much needed, after submerging ones self into bodice ripper seriousness, and my gripes are generally very few when I'm particularly seeking the escapism from the harshness of historical depictions. If, of course, you don't have 400 pages of saying absolutely nothing, and inoffensive, acute censorship for the frail hearted, as my last freebie-read was.

♪ We're not afraid of the big, bad wolf; the big bad wOooo-oolf. ♪

Wolf Trevelyan, he's the Big BAD WOLF. He's got a dead wife and mystery under his belt to spook the locals into giving him his privacy. Every bedtime euphemism in reference the age-old Little Red Riding Hood fairytale was clearly established early on! He's predatory, he stalks, he threatens every angle of propriety, as he waits in the woods with a keen anticipation for Red, the flaming haired Molly Kincaid, on her periodic visits to her grandma's house deep within the woods.

Molly's a 24 year old, genuinely innocent girl who is tempted by the alluring mystery and wounded paw of the Big Bad Wolf. She's telling the missing side of the story of a maturity behind the innocence; revealing a new, true character living behind that scrim of male desire: the good girl who wants it just as much as he does.


Once Molly informs her family of her upcoming plans, the author conveniently left out the mother's opinion of Molly's newfound acquaintance, and all that. In the beginning, she had been adamant, along with the grandmother, on Wolf's no-good worthiness, and after Molly told them of her upcoming hopes to wed this social pariah, the author all but faded to black on their response, despite a few snivels here and there. For a girl of 24, Molly sure had the clucking old biddies in her defense, and seemingly almost preferred Molly DIDN'T have any relationships at all! And when Molly's love for Wolf took her down the road of being tempted by his proposal, her mother up and marries some fellow, too. I thought her mother, for all her backdrop presence, was a wee bit selfish and undermined the idea and notion that Molly could ever be happy.

There were several subplots that had great potential for advancing the overall story. A few were left feeling somewhat unfinished or rushed for a the side-character HEA. The Big Bad Wolf's backstory truly didn't get its airing out, and no other side-stories were linked to it, in order to bring it to a festering head.

The Big Bad Wolf seemed in a constant turmoil to either ruin Molly, plotting against her, or defiling her purity in some manner - in disbelief that someone could be that innocent and/or genuine. He's stuffed her deep plunging bodice with ill-gotten money(she was a gambling hell debutante), sent his friends to flirt her into submission in order to reveal her vices, and deemed her fat, as a means to revealing his suspicions of her pregnancy...and avoid his own tender feely-goods of her and this new family-way condition. Is he a menace? It's very likely, but definitely not a rival of the general heroes I'm more prone to reading. It was a sweet little spin, on an old story, and I definitely needed the respite.

Very anticlimactic. Wished the H groveled more. h was a doormat.

I loved the twist on this old fairy tail, a must read.