The Queen of Hearts is a villain, she is an unfeeling, irrational, power hungry murderer. That's what all the stories tell you, but she wasn’t always this way. She was once a baker, and a good one.  A baker who was always bound to lose her heart, for better or worse. The Queen of Hearts is a hero.

That is what we learn in Heartless by Marissa Meyer. It is an origin story for the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, giving us an unfortunate occurrence where we know the end, but we have yet to fill in the middle. The queen of hearts, or in this book, Catherine Pinkerton, more readily referred to as “Cath,” wishes nothing more than to be a baker, but her parents have another idea in mind: to marry her off to the king. This story takes us through her struggles with class differences, following her heart rather than her head, and ultimately breaks the readers' hearts when we discover what we knew all along: that Cath must become queen no matter what she wishes or wants.

Meyers is an American novelist who writes fairytale retellings with a twist that makes her stories something special. Her most famous book Cinder is a retelling of Cinderella through a futuristic cyborg lens. All her books lean towards Young Adult (YA) fantasy and science fiction. She is published through Macmillan Publishers who publish works of various genres and adult and children fiction and non-fiction.   

 This book felt like a constant string of arrows being fired; while not all of them hit their mark, the ones that did cut deep. Meyer knows just how to tug at the heartstrings, leaving you with a sense of dread, yet somehow relief. The ending itself was not predictable and completely threw me for a loop. While standalones can oftentimes feel unfinished, this one does a good job at ending where it ends because the author will rely on Alice in Wonderland to explain the rest of Cath’s life.

I think the author did an amazing job at weaving characters from Alice in Wonderland into the story, like the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the Jabberwock. Incorporating them into the story in a way readers would feel fulfilled for knowing information that the characters themselves don’t even know. It gives life to the Queen of Hearts in a way that I’ve never seen and I was really glad we got to see the first use of the phrase “Off with its head”.

Although I liked this book I do feel like a lot of Cath’s actions weren't fully fledged. It felt a little fast for her to switch her opinions and plans and I would have liked for Meyers to play that out longer. The book also switches from very fast paced to very slow paced which can make the reader disconnect at times.

The whole book seems to work around the question: can determination, dreams, and true love help you escape your fate? Then at the very end we find out the answer that we knew all along. You can’t escape your fate no matter how hard you try to.

 You will like this book if you are a fan of Caraval by Stephanie Garber, it has the same type of wondrous feel where not everything is as it seems and you are constantly trying to guess what happens next, who the real villain is, and if everything will come together in the end. The audience this is targeted for is definitely YA Fantasy and people who like Grimm stories will appreciate the retelling aspect and the ending of this book. 

I have never before in my life liked the Queen of Hearts, I have always found her catty, pathetic, and insane in the worst way. Meyer twists that image that has been ingrained in me since childhood and gives me a sense of hope only to rip it away from me pages later. This book is an endless game of tug of war on my feelings, yanking me in every direction. One second she is going to run away with her maid and open a bakery, the next she is leaving her home and heading to a whole new world with the court jester. 

Meyers has a way of making you believe the impossible is possible, that duchesses can be bakers, that fate can be changed, and that true love will prevail. In the end when none of those things come true she leaves us heartbroken and yet satisfied, bringing us back to what we have been wrestling with the whole book, proving what we knew all along; the Queen of Hearts is the villain of the story.