Heartless
Author: Marissa Meyer
Grade: A
The origin story for the Queen of Hearts as told by Marissa Meyer! I really enjoyed Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series and I always love Wonderland so this was one of my most anticipated books in 2016.
The white cover is an exclusive from November’s Owlcrate, which was Alice in Wonderland themed…
Okay, now the book! Heartless tells the story of Lady Catherine the daughter of a Marquess who dreams of opening up a bakery with her best friend & maid. She is also dreaming about the handsome mysterious Jest, the new magician at the Royal Court.
Unfortunately the weak, silly and rather stupid King dreams about making Lady Catherine his Queen. Some well-known characters like Hatta and Cheshire pop up both amusingly and in some cases sadly. And of course plenty of strange things happen.
Will Catherine’s dreams come true? The great thing about this story is that even though you pretty much know where it’s going Meyer keeps it new and interesting. I love Alice and there was that sense here of the familiar well-mixed with the fresh and new. And not just in fairy tale terms… Cath’s dream of opening her shop and being a business woman is a nice change of pace. But in the end it comes up brutally against her reality.
In other words for me everything worked well. I really felt for, well, pretty much everybody at the end but then there was another part of me was mentally yelling at everybody, “It’s all your fault! Off with your heads!”
There were some slight issues. I figured out the monster pretty quickly and I never really felt like I got to know Jest. I wanted more of his story especially more concrete information about why he was in Hearts. Also I could not unsee Sebastian Stan playing this character- which is not a bad thing it just messed with my head a little bit.
Recommend: Yes. It’s good for fans of Marissa Meyer, Wonderland and origin stories!