Red Queen continues where Alice left off. Alice and Hatcher leave the clutches of the Old City to find Hatcher's long lost daughter. They look forward to the idyll of the verdant fields beyond the city, but find only ash and desert...a land destroyed not by wildfire, but some dangerous power. As they head deeper into this ravaged land, they learn of the hold the White Queen has over it and that they've unwittingly become the pawns in her cruel game against the Black King. The only way out may be to ally with the Red Queen, whose magic runs deep and dark.
I must admit that I did not like this sequel nearly as much as its predecessor...I think, in part, because it focused too much on a romance between Alice and Hatcher that felt a bit too teen angsty and forced. It took me out of the action and terror that I so enjoyed from the first novel. Additionally, it's been a long time since I've read Through the Looking-Glass, and I've read that fewer times than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, so it was more difficult to make the connections between the stories (that's on me). I also think that Alice was such a twist on the original that perhaps the shock value wasn't there for me. That said, I did enjoy watching Alice come a bit more into her own in this book, and I'm looking forward the upcoming collection of novellas set in this universe as well as Henry's other twisted reimaginings of classic children's tales.
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