Book Review: Heartless

                                                            Heartless Review

Heartless is a story that is set in Wonderland and is about the future Queen of Hearts who in this story is a young woman named Catherine Pinkerton. Catherine is a lady that has no desire to become queen and instead dreams of opening her own baker with her best friend and maid Mary Ann which is something that her parents especially her mother disapproves of since her mother wants her to become queen because of all the benefits it would have on the family's social standing. On the night of the ball Catherine ends up meeting and falling for Jest the court's new joker and from that day onwards Catherine can't get him out of her head.

As the story goes on Catherine dreams not only of opening her own baker but now she also dreams of being able to have a relationship with Jest but it seems that everyone around her including Jest who despite returning her affections, thinks it would be for the best if she marries the king. It is eventually revealed that Jest is actually from the kingdom of Chess and that he came to steal the Queen of Hearts, heart and he believes that Catherine's heart is the one that he's meant to take but finds that he can't bring himself to steal her heart because he has come to love her. Catherine despite having no interest in the king finds it impossible to say no to him when he asks to marry her so this leads to her and Jest deciding to run away to Chess together but things go terribly wrong before they can get there.

The Wonderland of this story is one that feels like Victorian times with a slight element of fantasy rather than a land of madness and impossibility that original Wonderland that was portrayed in Alice in Wonderland which was something that I found disappointing. Another thing that sadly fell short in this book was the attempts at language humor such as Margaret's always saying the wrong morals which is something that feel like could have been a lot of fun if it was done better although to be fair I find writing things such as this well to be very difficult. I probably would've been able to overlook the thing with the language humor if it wasn't for the fact that the second season of A Series of Unfortunate Events came out while I was reading this book and that series is much better at the way it plays with language, this also led to me comparing the series to this book in other ways as well such as how despite having more things limiting their agency the Baudelaires are a lot more proactive in their story than Catherine is in hers which is something that bothers me more the more I think about it.

Overall I thought the book was okay but I felt like it didn't quite capture the magic of Wonderland which is something that really disappointed me since that was a big selling point for this book. Please tell me your thoughts on this book in the comment section below.