Heartless
This is one of those “It’s not you, book, it’s me” times, which is a terrible shame because I expected to love it. A darker Wonderland tale about the rise of a horrible queen? Hell yeah! Sign me up! And it started out well! This isn’t a bad book. It’s not badly written. I just suffered some sort of disconnect 200 pages in and never recovered. I like the way Meyer expanded on the world building of Wonderland and, as I indicated above, this story should have been extremely my jam, but I would actually have to be dead in order to care less about these characters. I think it’s at least in part because Meyer built the story around a doomed romance, so the romance was driving most of the plot, and I often get bored in such cases. (I’m just not much of a romantic.) It also didn’t help that the plot was basically a fancy Wonderland version of the good old “aristocrat girl meets common boy and is torn between desire and duty” cliché. And I’m really not a fan of how it played out in the end. I had one thought repeating in my head while reading the final chapters:
(show spoiler)
