Review: War of the Cards

War of the Cards by Colleen Oakes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's a strange case, this book. I really don't know why I gave the first Queen of Hearts book five stars anymore - I mean, I liked the book, I thought it was fun, but five stars' worth of fun? More like four, maybe. Certainly not as down in quality as the sophomore slump that was Blood of Wonderland. And now, here we get the trilogy's conclusion in War of the Cards, which, like its predecessor, actually lacks a little in what its title promises...but overall doesn't lose the fast-moving, addictive quality that made me really power through the first two books.

What's really odd about this book is how much I like it, since it really plays with expectations perhaps a little too much. The way it links back to the original Alice in Wonderland story is...rather unexpected, especially when we find out that Lewis Carroll's Alice is nothing like the one in this "real" Wonderland. To be fair, though, that makes sense given how different some other characters are from their Carroll counterparts - Cheshire, especially, comes to mind. Like Blood of Wonderland, the Native American-esque Yurkei feature very prominently, and their function in the story does, again, feel a little too Daenerys-ally-ish...but thankfully, Oakes makes it a point of avoiding writing them into seriously problematic plotlines, one of which would have been potentially caused by the book's real villain. There's also a very surprising scene in which Dinah catches Wardley in bed with a woman - thus subverting how Blood implied that he was gay, and while I did feel a little bit queerbaited at first, checking back against Blood, it's clear that Wardley never actually said he was gay, just...not in love with Dinah. Reading between the lines is all well and good, but refrain from assuming, y'know? (That said, though, even though Queen of Hearts was one of the next books in my system of hand-selling choices for this day, I decided to put off the promotion for a bit.)

Maybe the ultimate ending that Oakes gives us feels a little too much like the unholy love child of Mockingjay and Gone Girl, but I have to give her credit where credit is due, and she deserves credit for flipping my expectations - almost all of them, in fact - on their heads.

To the Queen of Hearts trilogy, I now say ave atque vale.

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