Mad About the Hatter by Dakota Chase
Published August 20th 2015
This isn’t his sister’s Wonderland….
Henry never believed his older sister, Alice’s, fantastic tales about the world down the rabbit hole. When he’s whisked away to the bizarre land, his best chance for escape is to ally himself with the person called the Mad Hatter. Hatter—an odd but strangely attractive fellow—just wants to avoid execution. If that means delivering “Boy Alice” to the Queen of Hearts at her Red Castle, Hatter will do what he has to do to stay alive. It doesn’t matter if Henry and Hatter find each other intolerable. They’re stuck with each other.
Along their journey, Henry and Hatter must confront what they’ve always accepted as truth. As dislike grows into tolerance and something like friendship, the young men see the chance for a closer relationship. But Wonderland is a dangerous place, and first they have to get away with their lives.
I really love the world of Wonderland so I’m always interested in any kind of retelling or expansion of the world. I was really interested to see what Mad About the Hatter would bring to the world of Wonderland but unfortunately, I didn’t love it as much as I wanted.
The overall plot is cool. I like the idea of Alice’s brother in Wonderland. But I didn’t really like him. He was kinda mean and I just didn’t get a good vibe from him.
The LGBT aspect of this book was really interesting and added diversity but the insta-love killed it for me. I really didn’t like the relationship. It felt forced into a part of the story that was very inappropriate and it made me want to punch someone.
The writing was so weird and poorly done. One line that really stuck out to me was “The colors were so bright he could barely look at them without his eyes tearing. Ditto for the sun…”. I’ve seen a couple of other reviews that used this quote as well. At first the book was written kind of in a classic, old time writing style but then things like that quote would pop up and I was so confused as to why the author chose to write like that.
There was also a whole lot of nothing in this book. I was waiting for some crazy crap to go down but it never did.
There was pretty much no character development which was so frustrating to me. There could have been a ton of character development but there wasn’t any.
Overall, this felt more like a medium grade fan fiction to me. It was okay but there’s better. As a critical reader, I just didn’t really enjoy this book. But if you’re not a critical reader, you’ll probably like this book way more then me.
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