Ratings:
Star Rating: ★★★★★
If This Book Was a Movie Rating: PG-13
Review:
“One to be a murderer. One to be a martyr. One to be a monarch. One to go mad.”
In my entire life, only five books have made me cry.
When I started this book, I thought it would hurt. I thought it would break my personal record for most tears cried because of a book.
This book didn’t break the record.
It completely shattered it.
I didn’t want this book to end. I wanted those desperate, desperate characters to have a chance. A chance to feel happiness.To feel love.To break the expectations surrounding them.
I wanted them to be mostly all right, if only for a moment.
“Long before she was the terror of Wonderland—the infamous Queen of Hearts—she was just a girl who wanted to fall in love.
Catherine may be one of the most desired girls in Wonderland, and a favorite of the unmarried King of Hearts, but her interests lie elsewhere. A talented baker, all she wants is to open a shop with her best friend. But according to her mother, such a goal is unthinkable for the young woman who could be the next queen.
Then Cath meets Jest, the handsome and mysterious court joker. For the first time, she feels the pull of true attraction. At the risk of offending the king and infuriating her parents, she and Jest enter into an intense, secret courtship. Cath is determined to define her own destiny and fall in love on her terms. But in a land thriving with magic, madness, and monsters, fate has other plans.”
Many times, books show us hope. Hope that the good guys will win, that the bad guys will be defeated, that the lovers end up together, that everyone gets their forever happily-ever-after.
But if everyone got a happy ending, it wouldn’t be so sighed over and sought after. For everyone with a happy ending, someone else will never make it.
What made the story so soulcrushing was that Cath and Jest and Hatta and Raven almost made it. They almost leveled the odds. They almost beat their fates and lived their own lives.
They were so agonizingly close.
Which then begs the question: could any of their fates have been avoided?
Cath made decisions. Cath's parents put enormous pressure on Cath and ignored all of her own dreams and ambitions. Mary Anne made other decisions. The king disregarded everyone’s real feelings and opinions for the sake of keeping the peace. Peter Peter chose anger over grief.
Maybe it was all of their faults. Maybe they were all doomed from the start.
Could they ever have beat the odds and changed the ending of their story? No matter how much we run and change, will our fates always be self-fulfilling prophecies?
Lady Catherine Pinkerton. Cath for short.
I can see a lot of myself in Cath. Someone that hates disappointing people. Someone that wants to make their parents happy with everything she does. Someone who often feels afraid. A lot of people might blame Cath for her choices, but in every moment, she did what many of us would, try as we might to convince ourselves we’d do it differently. Cath wasn’t necessarily the most courageous of heroines, but she was a true one.
The Joker. His real name is Jest.
My heart broke a little every time I saw him longing for Cath, risking his life for her, giving everything up so they could have a chance at a future together. I sobbed literally every time he was on the page because he was so kind and sweet and whimsical and I knew it wasn’t going to end well.
The day after I finished the book, I saw the words jest and fool in my school reading and almost started crying again.
Raven. Inspired by “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe.
He had his fate too. He could only mourn. He could never save, he could only end.
The Mad Hatter. His real name is Hatta.
He wanted to escape the madness that had plagued his family for generations. He tried to change. He tried to escape, constantly moving the opposite direction of Time.
In the end though, he didn’t make it either.
Time caught up with Hatta, and he became known as the Mad Hatter.
Of all four, not one escaped their fate.
See, this is a villain origin story. That entire book, I knew what the ending would be. I knew my sweet little innocent Cath would have her heart broken. I knew that her pain would turn her into a wicked shell of what she had been. I knew that to become Queen, she’d need to marry the King of Hearts. I knew her and Jest would never end well, as much as they believed they could.
I knew every single part of it.
And yet, when that book ended, my heart was still shattered into a thousand bleeding pieces.
How is a raven like a writing desk?
There are thousands of answers.
Know that they’ll all lead to the same thing in the end.
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Buy this book: https://www.amazon.com/Heartless-Marissa-Meyer/dp/1250044650/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1633886567&sr=8-1
Recommendations If You Liked This Book:
Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmer
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
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