Review: Heartless by Marissa Meyer!

Thank you to Macmillan UK for sending me a copy! This has in no way affected my review.

All Cath wants is to open a bakery, and not just any bakery, but the best bakery in all of Hearts, with her best friend. Unfortunately for Cath, she is a Marquess’ daughter and knows how unlikely her mother is to allow Cath to start a business. To make matters work Cath’s baking has had an undesired side effect- she has caught the King’s attention; he’s romantic attention. After Cath realises the King is leading up to proposing at one of his infamous balls, she runs. Right into Jest.

Jest is one of the King’s Jokers. He can do amazing magic tricks, and bespells Cath from their first meeting. Cath knows she has to make some big decisions about what she wants from her future, and who she wants to spend it with.

Heartless is a prequel to Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carol, telling the story of the infamous callous Queen of Hearts before she became the villain we all know.

Heartless is also Meyer’s first standalone book, but not her first retelling- her Lunar Chronicles is one of the most popular YA series in recent years. I loved the Lunar Chronicles, unfortunately I didn’t get on as well with Heartless.

It was all a little disney. And I do like disney, but something about it was quite immature, which wasn’t something I found about the Lunar Chronicles at all. I also found it quite hard to imagine a lot of the settings, Meyer explained things about Heart, the world the story is set, as the story goes along, but there is so much happening that a lot slipped by. The animal characters were also pretty hard to get a mental image of, and this really stunted my reading.

While I was reading I was happy enough, but whenever I put Heartless down I felt no need to pick it back up, even when I was nearing the end. I very nearly did not finish Heartless because of this. I really can’t put my finger on what it was that didn’t work for me about Heartless, but I didn’t connect with the characters (something that was always a strong point in Meyer’s past books) or the storyline. Something just didn’t click.

I would definitely recommend this book for younger readers though, I can see 12+ readers really enjoying Heartless.

Meyer obviously has a great talent for writing series, so I hope read more from her in the future.

I’m giving Heartless 2.5 ice creams.

Heartless is out now in the US, and is out on February 9th 2017 in the UK- with this gorgeous cover!

And of course you’ve probably seen the US cover already-

 

Which cover do you prefer? I think I like the UK one suits the story more, but I prefer the US one.

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I’m a little disappointed I didn’t enjoy this book more, but I’ll always support Marissa Meyer, The Lunar Chronicles was and is amazing. If you haven’t read it, go and do so! Even if you don’t like sci-fi, I can very nearly guarantee you will love it!