Heartless by Marissa Meyer

• Release Date: 11/08/16

• Audiobook Length :  14 Hours 34 Minutes

• Genre: Fairytale

• Publisher:Macmillan Audio / Feiwel & Friends

Katherine Pinkerton knows better than dream of owning her own bakery baker, she knows her destiny lies in becoming the queen of a wacky, quirky, surreal little Kingdom of Hearts. On the night she is to be betrothed she sets eyes on the handsome court joker, who has more than cards up his sleeves.

Unlike the Lunar Chronicles where the fairytale aspects are subtext and set in a modern world, Heartless is an overt-played-straight prequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Meyer digs into the Kingdom of Hearts and all its little oddities. It’s a place where animals talk, playing cards are courtier and if one bring something back from a dream. . . well then so be it. 

What we don’t really get to dig into in this novel is the plot. Plot points in the novel are hung like painting with no nails, there are a lot of them, you want to see them. . . but they have a tendency to fall off. One of the many plot in this book is about a forbidden romance that never really started for me. There is also a beta romance, a monster, intrigue,  war and magic. . . but we never get fully invested in any of it.

If you’ve read Fairest then you know Meyer has already explored the idea of what makes a villain a villain. In Fairest she focuses on those who are naturally evil, but in this novel she looks at the outside forces that can turn a hopeful baker into The Queen of Hearts. In the end the change was too simple, basically it came down to a binary . It’s like . . . that thing. . . if you did the opposite of that thing then you would have been fine.

And what’s even more curiouser and curiouser is the tone the novel takes, it goes from whimsical to oddly dark, then right back to light again.

Rebecca Soler always comes to win with her grand performances. She takes each characters voice as her own Her performance of the man-child, babbling, silly King of Hearts was so on point. Unfortunately Soler makes use of this quasi-British accent that just doesn’t hit the mark all the time.

Heartless is a different beat from the Lunar Chronicles (and I think the cover totally tricks you into thinking this is apart of the series) , that’s may be more for fans of Lewis Carroll than the Lunar Chronicles.