Red Queen

Starred review from June 27, 2016
Henry's sequel to Alice, a retelling of Through the Looking Glass, leaves the City behind as Alice and her companion, Hatcher, begin a quest to find Hatcher's daughter, Jenny. Their dangerous journey takes them through the exposed wastes of the Black King, and into the magic forest of the White Queen, where breaking the rules means death but the rules are always unknown. When Alice and Hatcher are separated, Alice must rediscover her own identity among the choices and challenges that face her and the past that continually tries to draw her back into madness. Alice's ongoing struggle is to distinguish reality from illusion, and Henry excels in mingling the two for the reader as well as her characters. The darkness in this book is that of fairy tales, owing more to Grimm's matter-of-fact violence than to the underworld of the first book; forest-dwelling giants, magic cottages with perpetually burning fires, and magical sacrifices to sustain immortality take the place of sex trafficking and rampant murder. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency.