A friend gifted me both books in this duology in 2016… 2 years ago! But I finally got around to it during BTAT 2018 and oh my GOD I should not’ve left it for so long!! This book is so damn good!
This isn’t a happy retelling with fluffy rabbits running late and a helpful caterpillar. No. This retelling is dark, gritty, and one you don’t want to read to kids.
We follow our main character Alice, who at the beginning of the book is interred in a mental hospital on the ‘bad’ side of the city since she went to her family raving about a man with rabbit ears. Whilst there she befriends a man who calls himself Hatcher through a hole in the wall between their cells, and they become as close as they can be in the circumstances.
Without spoiling too much, they manage to leave the asylum, and their lives from this point onwards just get even weirder and dangerous. I really want to just gush about this book but I can’t spoil it for you before you read it! It’s so incredibly dark and is definitely not aimed at children, with so much intense world building and ugh, it’s just amazing!!
I had thought about going through where I tabbed and annotated the book and mentioning specific points but I’ve literally added more than 40 different tabs to this book so I had to give up on that!
I have one tiny gripe with this book, and that is that our protagonists seem to solve their problems too easily and quickly. However, I’m withholding full judgment on this until I read Red Queen as there could be some sort of plot point there. This is 100% a 5/5* read and I urge you to pick it up. I am so excited to get to more of Christina Henry’s work!!!
Abi of Pellinor 
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