Heartless

Heartless works best when it remembers a bakery can be a rebellion.

I came to Heartless knowing the Queen of Hearts by reputation. That is a strange way to meet a girl who wants a shop, a friend beside her and a life she chose herself. Marissa Meyer makes the gap between those two images do most of the work. I cared more about Catherine's flour-dusted ambition than about the crown waiting in the distance. Good. A crown has enough admirers.

This 2016 standalone is YA, and its leads are teenagers. It has the bright, cruel logic of a fairy tale: adults call something sensible, and the young person asked to surrender her future is expected to thank them. I found that infuriating in exactly the right way. I also found parts of the middle far more circular than they need to be. Both can be true.

The premise (no spoilers past Catherine meeting Jest)

Catherine Pinkerton lives in Wonderland, where the unmarried King of Hearts favours her as a possible queen. Cath would rather open a bakery with her best friend. Her mother considers that dream beneath the family's ambitions. Then Catherine meets Jest, the mysterious court joker, and the prospect of choosing her own future becomes still more urgent. The book is a prequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, telling the Queen of Hearts' story before she becomes the figure readers know.

That is the publisher's starting line and mine. Knowing the destination does not tell you which decisions will make it hurt. The early conflict is wonderfully plain: a girl can make something excellent, yet the people around her value the title she might acquire more than the work she wants to do. Meyer does not need a magical explanation for that particular absurdity.

What works

The baking gives Catherine's wish weight. A vague hunger for freedom can go soft on the page; a shop needs rooms, recipes, labour, money and somebody willing to unlock the door in the morning. Whenever Cath talks about that future, the story briefly stops being a decorative tale about a future villain and becomes a recognisable fight over whose life she is allowed to lead. I would follow a whole novel about the shop. I suspect the court would regard that as an insult, which improves the idea.

Meyer's Wonderland also has the advantage of being genuinely inconvenient. Its oddness is not merely wallpaper behind a girl in a pretty dress. The world runs on its own foolish certainties, so ordinary social pressure acquires a particularly maddening shape. Meyer can make whimsy feel like a rule that everybody obeys because nobody wants to be the person who asks why. That is a clever fit for a story about compliance.

The romance between Cath and Jest has the right fairy-tale function. He represents a possible choice, and more than that, a person who seems to see the choice as hers. Their secret courtship gives the book longing and risk without asking the teenage characters to carry an adult romance. I liked their sense of conspiracy. It has the fragile brightness of a plan made before the adults come in and explain that plans are apparently a form of misconduct.

Most of all, the known Queen of Hearts casts a shadow backwards. Origin stories often labour to explain every famous detail. Here the strongest effect is simpler: the kinder the early Catherine appears, the more I scrutinise the pressures surrounding her. The distance between who she is and who she is expected to become creates tension even when the action pauses.

What's polarising

And the action does pause. Repeated obstacles to the bakery, the king and the secret courtship can begin to feel like the same argument wearing a different hat. Wonderland has plenty of hats. I wanted a few more changes in the terms of the conflict, not another reminder that Cath's mother disapproves. The book is long enough that its hesitation becomes part of the experience: the reader waits for a decision, then waits while everyone arranges another occasion on which it might be made.

The whimsy will also divide readers. I enjoyed its theatricality in small doses, but sometimes an eccentric flourish arrives just when a hard emotional beat could use silence. Meyer's instinct is to keep the place recognisably Wonderland. Mine, as a reader, was occasionally to ask Wonderland to leave the room for five minutes.

There is a further problem built into any prequel to a notorious character: if you know the destination, you may feel the story moving pieces toward it even when the pieces resist. I did. The strongest chapters make Catherine's choices feel alive; the weaker ones make fate feel like an overbearing stage manager. Readers who need a romance untouched by tragic expectation should take that seriously.

The Catherine of it

Cath is appealing because her dream is both modest and enormous. She does not begin by asking to rule a kingdom. She asks to practise a skill and share the result. That can make her seem passive beside louder fantasy heroines, especially when she hesitates under family pressure. I read that hesitation as part of the point, though I still wanted to shake her once or twice. My patience is imperfect; so is hers.

Her friendship matters as much to my investment as her feelings for Jest. The bakery is imagined as a shared future, which makes every royal expectation an attempt to take away more than a job. The book is sharpest when it understands that a life is made of these small, particular loyalties. A girl should be allowed to keep her friends and her ovens. Apparently this requires a revolution.

Spice and heat

Heat: 0 of 5. Heartless is YA, Catherine and Jest are teenagers, and there is no spice. Their connection is written as longing, secrecy and the stakes of choosing for yourself. No reader should come here expecting an adult heat level.

The emotional content is heavier than the heat note might suggest. The story trades in family pressure, threatened autonomy and the dread that comes from knowing the Queen of Hearts' reputation. It is a fairy tale with an ache beneath the sugar, so I would give it to a reader who likes wistfulness more readily than one who wants comfort.

Who it's for

Read Heartless if you like retellings that ask what a famous villain wanted before the famous part began. Read it if a girl's determination to bake professionally strikes you as a serious plot, because Meyer agrees with you at her best. Bring patience for the middle and a taste for elaborate nonsense.

I would especially give it to someone who thinks a foreknown ending removes suspense. The suspense here lives in the smaller question of how many times a person can be told her own wish is trivial before she starts to believe it. That is a much less comfortable story than the pastries suggest.

Books like Heartless

• The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor, for another Wonderland reshaped around a young woman's contested future.
• The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert, for a darker fairy-tale world that presses on a girl's sense of who she is.
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente, for a strange realm with more wit and more appetite for wonder.

None offers exactly Cath's combination of sugar and dread. If that is what stayed with you, it is probably because Heartless understands how easy it is to dismiss a small dream, and how expensive that dismissal can become.

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