Zoe Hana Mikuta's Off with Their Heads realizes the phrase "We're all mad here" in such memorably gruesome ways that Lewis Carroll and his Cheshire Cat would be astounded. In this mesmerizing YA fantasy horror reimagining of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the author of the Gearbreakers series, two brave and broken young witches fight monsters and each other. Mikuta infuses her lush, bloody, anarchic lovers-to-enemies vision of the classic children's novel with elements of Korean culture and visceral magic for a strikingly filmic reading experience.
White Queen Delcorta October Kkul made a game of pitting human criminals against Saints, magical heroes who have transformed into grotesque monsters that feed on human emotion. No matter who survived the contest, the queen always slayed the Saints. When Iccadora Alice Sickle and Carousel Rabbit were 16, Saint Kat Pillar slipped her captors and escaped the Queen's deadly "Saints' Races." The girls, madly in love with each other, nearly died in their brush with the Saint, who wound up in their village, and were unable to help their close friend Tecca, whom Kat brutally killed. The magical stain of Tecca's death tainted the girls, forcing them to become Jabberwockies, prisoners sentenced to Wonderland Forest, a place where feral Saints roam largely unchecked. Icca, who can control darkness (darkporting), and Caro, who can control crows, combined their powers to survive and hunt the monsters in the woods. They were sustained by a love that "pricked and stung... they were already such barbed girls. Such bramble-wrought souls."
The girls grew strong in their power and wild magic leaked as fluid from their eyes, noses, and mouths, blue for Caro and silver for Icca. Together, they worked toward the only thing that could end their banishment: presenting four Saints' heads to the Queen. Eventually, both girls paid their debt and reentered society, but a mutual betrayal left them unable to walk out of Wonderland together, unable to be anything resembling together ever again. "What do you get when you have two witches with violent tendencies in love, and you take away the love?... You get two witches with violent tendencies."
Five years later, Icca and Caro are madly in hate. Icca lives to take the heads of Saints, and plot her vengeance against the crown for Tecca's death and her own imprisonment. The White Queen has died, but in her place reigns her perilous daughter Hattie November Kkul, the Red Queen. Hattie's crimson magic flows from her body constantly, leaving her unable to wear any color but red because of the stains. Rumor has it Hattie murdered her mother, though no one could prove her guilt at the time. She keeps an entourage of absolved Jabberwockies called the Culled Court, in which Caro now serves her as devotedly as Icca despises her. Hattie has "reformed" the Saints' Races to no longer include humans: instead, she creates her own custom monsters by magically stitching Saints together, then pitting the results against non-augmented Saints in public matches. "Hattie [is] cruel, and insane, and she [makes] a joke of this world," but she's also powerful beyond question. Caro regards her with awe, "and Caro liked being in awe. It kept the boredom fastened back."
This year's Saints' Races approach, and Icca's determination to put an end to the Kkuls puts her on a collision course with Caro. As the ex-lovers lose their heads over their animosity, the Red Queen waits in the wings with a sinister plan for the deadly and damaged heroines.
Mikuta weaves a dark and tangled spell of soul-rending pain and terrible yearning that grafts to the source material with ease, translating iconic characters through the lexicon of her vicious world. Here the Cheshire Cat becomes a beautiful gossip of a young man, while the Caterpillar is a nightmarish creature who spins its nest from human bodies. The plot and relationship trajectories follow the model of the Caucus Race, none of the participants able to win but none of them able to stop running. Like Alice, Icca follows her White (Carousel) Rabbit into places where only madness and pain wait for her, knowing that being "good wouldn't keep her alive. It would barely keep her entertained." The author trusts her audience to ride the waves of surreal logic in her ambitious creation, never over-simplifying the mad world. Her prose rings vibrant in its descriptions and luxurious in its emotionality as readers follow Icca and Caro through chapters that alternate between the aching tragedies of their adolescence and their reunion as spiteful, vitriolic young adults. Lines blur between love and hate as well as genius and madness in a story that suggests true danger comes not from the threat of monsters, but from the vulnerability of the human heart. Teen readers looking for a fresh, deep take on magic, an unabashedly angst-filled breakup play-by-play, or a darkly irreverent rendering of a childhood classic should not hesitate to leap down the rabbit hole into this epic journey, told in Mikuta's velvet-and-razors prose. --Jaclyn Fulwood