Book Review: Heartless

TITLE: Heartless
AUTHOR: Marissa Meyer
PUBLISHED: November 2016
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy, Classic Book Referencing
PREMISE: A reimagining of the world of Alice in Wonderland that looks at the Queen of Hearts before she became the woman Alice knew in the books...
MY REVIEW: I bought this one a while ago because I love Lunar Chronicles and basically everything Marissa Meyer writes, I'm probably going to be buying. Especially if it's great ideas like this one is. I wanted this since the moment I heard about it. For the most part, it did not disappoint.
Now, I'm going to address the elephant in the room: it is not as good as Lunar Chronicles. But that hardly means it's bad. I just don't love it nearly as much as I did that series. It's not really Heartless' fault, I just fangirled really hard over Lunar Chronicles so it's going to take a lot to top it for me. Heartless' main fault is that it is terribly slow. Especially in the beginning. I also...am not fond of the insta-love thing that happened with Jest. Granted, at least Jest wasn't a douche, so there's that. But still, enough insta-love writers. We notice it. It doesn't work.
But despite the slowness and the insta-love bits, this wound up being a rather good character study of the Queen of Hearts and what might have made her the way she was. I can't help but think of the Alice Through the Looking Glass movie because that tried to do a small backstory bit on the Queen of Hearts and....yeah, this version is much better. Not that that would be hard, Alice Through the Looking Glass had lots of story problems.
For the most part, I think this was a successful book. The characters were developed (well, aside from Jest), the writing was Meyer's usual great combination of setting/dialogue. It was a plausible what-could-have-happened before that didn't retcon any of the original Alice in Wonderland to make things easier for the author either. All in all, I enjoyed this one a lot.
WHO SHOULD READ: Marissa Meyer fans, Alice in Wonderland fans
MY RATING: Four out of Five plausible back stories