Oh Heartless, Heartless, Heartless, where do I start?
A prequel to such a famous book is always going to be a tricky thing and I hugely admire the ambition of this novel. It’s a challenge to take a well-known character, a villain no less, and tell an origin story that’s fresh and unpredictable.
Heartless tackles the origin story of the Queen of Hearts from Alice In Wonderland (sorry, sorry, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland you hipster purists, look I was raised on Disney don’t judge me). The Queen in the source materials is a furious, impulsive dictator with a beheading fetish. Catherine, the girl we meet in Heartless, is a reserved dreamer with a passion for baking. Quite a leap, right? It was sort of clever how Meyer revealed to us the seeds of the evil queen of hearts within Catherine. The evil queen is cold and selfish and though Cath seemed sweet on the surface, the way she never really paid all that much attention to the people around her, making them seem flat and underdeveloped, was a neat show over tell trick.
I’ll confess, I haven’t read Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland so I’m assuming the rules of magic and how it exists in the different lands is more thoroughly explained in the source material. I could’ve done with a touch of a summary but am cool with chalking it up to generalized whimsy for the sake of the ambiance. The plot was similarly basic, given that we know the end to this story it was pretty much a given that things were going to go horribly wrong at some point and I’m awarding myself all the points to Slytherin for figuring out the plot twists pretty early on (cleverness isn’t solely reserved for Ravenclaws).
This may be a sort of weird thing to say but my favorite part of the book was the pastry stuff. I’m the kind of person that likes to watch the Food Network when I’m hungry and retweet cake pictures when I’m stressed so loving, thorough descriptions of baked goods are my jam and Cath’s as well. The first chapter had me ready to straight up murder for a lemon tart and it only got more intense from there. Definitely pick up some cookies or something to munch on while reading because this book will leave you with one hell of a craving.
Overall, when it comes to Marissa Meyer, The Lunar Chronicles still owns my heart (even though my otp, Scarlet/Winter, was never going to be canon *Adele voice* we could’ve had it aaaaaaaaall) but Heartless is definitely a must read for anyone in the mood for pastry porn and fluffy villain origin stories.
Heartless Challenge!
As a special bonus, MacKids is currently running a Heartless Challenge where you have a chance to win an ARC of Heartless every day until 11/8. And heads up, there are 14 days until Heartless is released, so 14 chances to win!
The challenge today is to take a picture of yourself wearing a crown and share it on social media using the #HeartlessCountdown hashtag. Here’s Meg in a crown looking regal AF.
Stephanie Kaye
haha, I couldn’t find my tiara from when I went to Prom in 2008 so I used the flower crown filter from Snapchat! Great review, by the way, I cannot wait til I get my hands on this book! 🙂
xo Stephanie
Oh and if you wanted to see my flower crown: https://www.instagram.com/p/BL_czUJh5di/?taken-by=inwonderland49
Hebe
As far as I remember, the original book doesn’t actually have *any* worldbuilding as we’d recognise it now – random whimsy is pretty much the order of the day.
Morgan @ Gone with the Words
I read Alice years and years ago, and from what I remember the Disney animated movie is very faithful to it; the book has more scenes of course but yeah, there isn’t much order or worldbuilding. So from that perspective I loved what Heartless did, even though I would have liked mooooore. The pastry and baking was my favorite part too! I had a lemon tart for the first time not long ago and it was so delicious omg. Glad you enjoyed the book overall, I did too 🙂
Carina Olsen
Gorgeous review Meg 😀 YAY for enjoying this one. <3 Sigh. I loved Heartless so, so much. Though that ending was so rude. Hmph. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about it 🙂 And aw, you look adorable. <3