“Hattie says we all react to Wonderland. ‘Its shadows are a looking-glass, Carousel…’ Is that right? It’s somethin’ like that.” “Is that what she preaches?” Icca’s brow twisted. “What the fuck does that even mean?” “That the Forest brings out what lies in the darkest depths of our little Divinities. Our darkest magic. Our darkest selves.”
TITLE—Off With Their Heads
AUTHOR—Zoe Hana Mikuta
PUBLISHED—2024
PUBLISHER—Disney Hyperion
AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR—Suzie Yeung
GENRE—dystopian spec fic fantasy sapphic horror Alice in Wonderland retelling (& a very erudite YA—I’m actually not sure why this is marketed as YA…)
SETTING—Wonderland & the surrounding Wards
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Alice in Wonderland re-imagining, friendship, dystopian society, gods & magic, witches, Saints, monsters & monster hunters, mysterious forest, PSPD, betrayal & forgiveness, love & hate, poison, tea, Korean inspired worldbuilding, queens & priestesses, body horror, grief & guilt, loss of childhood/innocence/parents, idolatry, problematic faves/leaders/lovers, the cannibalism & collateral of grudges & revenge, the monsters we fear & the monsters we become through that fear, the responsibility of power, creation, & the power of creation, the deaths of our past selves & the creation of new selves
WRITING STYLE—★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CHARACTERS—★ ★ ★ ★
STORY/PLOT—★ ★ ★
BONUS ELEMENT/S—dark witch & crow witch MCs
PHILOSOPHY—?
PREMISE—?
EXECUTION—I mean, I was vibin’ 😆
“I am the thing scuttling around in the Dark, Icca promised herself. I am the only thing to be afraid of. …and she’d brought her own monster, she was the master of the universe, because Icca was the fucking Dark witch, bitch… She who was both the slayer of monsters and the worst of them.”
Summary:
“Once upon a time there was a young girl named Alice. She followed Rabbit into Wonderland, because I was in love. Very much so. Now I’m not. Now I’ve got to kill the Rabbit, and send the Saints up and over—don’t you see your dearest Red Queen is mad, having your shield so swollen with monsters?”
My thoughts:
I had no idea what was going on in this book but what wild, wacky fun it was!! Not sure other than the explicit references how any of this story connected thematically to Carroll’s original tale but the reimagining was excellent. On some level I have to think that the plot was not the point of this book. I mean, is literary YA a thing? Am I giving the 23 yo author the benefit of the doubt? Oyeyemi was only 18 & studying for her A-levels when she wrote Icarus Girl… I never for a moment wanted to put this book down. I loved the vibes. It’s definitely got a strong YA romantasy horror feel to it but it’s also so much more than that. It’s clever! Far cleverer than any YA I’ve ever read before.
I especially loved the Korean-inspired worldbuilding that is not overexplained at all for those readers who are unfamiliar with things like hanboks, honorifics, & various kinds of traditional cuisine so you can either infer meaning from context, gloss over it, or look it up as you wish. Loved this about the book, props to the editor/publisher for not interfering with the author’s choices re: that.
“They never appreciated what they were, how miraculous it was to exist so strangely.”
I would recommend this book to readers who love a good, vibey, dark, horror fairytale retelling. This book is best read on audiobook! Yeung did an amazing job narrating the story & made it a lot easier for me to follow everything that was going on in the book. (I… also followed along on ebook though because this one was especially erudite—which is part of why I loved it so much.)
Final note: This was totally unhinged. I loved it.
“Haven’t we always shared our punishments, dear?” She watched Caro’s throat move. “Come on, Rabbit. It’ll be just like old times. Just like Wonderland.”
★ ★ ★ ★ .5
CW // animal death, very graphic body horror & gruesome κιllιngs, PSPD, PTSD (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Season: Late Summer
Music pairing: “Alice in Wonderland,” by Joanna Wang
Further Reading—
SHE IS A HAUNTING by Trang Thanh Tran
THE SALT GROWS HEAVY by Cassandra Khaw
ALICE by Christina Henry—TBR
AFTER ALICE by Gregory Maguire
A BLADE SO BLACK by LL McKinney—TBR
THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS by Laird Hunt
A LESSON IN VENGEANCE by Victoria Lee
LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR by Mizuki Tsujimura
BESTIARY by K-Ming Chang—TBR
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Favorite Quotes—
Epigraph:
“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?” — RICHARD SIKEN, WAR OF THE FOXES, “PORTRAIT OF FRYDERYK IN SHIFTING LIGHT”
Part I
“There exists an old creation tale that they tell in the country of Isanghan: a girl asleep in a flower field, who dreams up the world. Carousel and Iccadora always liked this guess at existence especially. Of some sickly little witch they were tucked away in, dreaming up dark things. Dreaming up them. Dreaming up Wonderland.”
“And to be known by other people! Other people? No, no, it would never work. Caro knew she’d just end up destroying them. She was possessed of sharp bits, of something dark and restless she could feel sitting in her chest, primed to explode all over the world like shrapnel, if she could ever get out of this place.”
“Saints: a term for people who had practiced and honed their magic—even though it corroded them, even though it was painful—“
“But Caro and Icca and Tecca had grown up in an era where Saints weren’t the righteous any longer; they were the deformed, starved beasts that skittered around in the Wonderland Forest past the Wall. Hardly anyone used their natural-born abilities—the world ate at them enough as it was.”
“The gods in her head were, of course, disparate from the gods in other people’s heads. …the question that guided Religion was: Where, and in what, did one, as an individual knot of consciousness, feel the gods here?”
“All of them—people, Caro, history—had always been trying to guess at Divinity. In this moment in time, most of them—at least in Isanghan—acknowledged Divinity as the whole tableau of reality, but common practice was to select particular elements as personal gods, to play favorites—picking threads out of the fabric, so to speak. The gods were nature, the night sky and the winter season and wildfires, and rot. The gods were forces, love and cruelty and dreams—but Caro found that people were forces, too, and thought, perhaps like a heretic, that she had seen Divinity worn into the edges of those she had attached a fondness to, and that these gods were so much more startling than all the others because, simply, they were close.”
“…the rare ones deemed as Saints shall be bestowed with Their ancient powers, abilities of incomprehensible extent, to cherish and to wield as light and sword in these darkest of times.”
“Love that was not fire, impulsive and burning, but habit, and easy for it.”
“How deeply the Moores would have grieved his death. They might as well have walked out into Wonderland. One could open a vein in one’s arm, and it didn’t compare to the wound grief drew into the soul; mourning was of nearly equal ability to the death trace, in drawing the Saints.”
“They called them Jabberwockies, those with death like a tag in the palm of their hand. …some Jabberwockies were impossibly powerful witches.”
“This was the knowing: Caro and Icca were Jabberwockies now, trailing death. And this was the rabidness: Carousel breathing, Carousel grinning at Icca with all of her teeth and none of her joy, and saying, ‘Oh, Alice, how late we are! Certainly late, for a very important date—we were supposed to go with Tecca, remember?’”
“It was all theatrics, her carrying words and their casual panic. It made the two of them vivid; it did not make them small things, so entirely small and exposed outside the loom of the Wall. They were not mourning. They were not scared. They were grand and ridiculous.”
“There wouldn’t have been a need for Saints if there hadn’t been a need for saving.”
“…she horrified everyone so, even when the young Red Queen often carried herself with unassuming grace, knowing and contemplative and altogether calm, quite calm.”
“She tugged her book from the smaller bag tucked beside the head-sack, balancing its spine on her knee. This one was about faeries; Icca liked that fictional trope, those nasty and violent and clever creatures. Her only tattoo was a string of tiny black mushrooms encircling her left wrist—a faerie circle ripped from one of her favorite stories.”
“Healing wasn’t a god she found much Divinity in.”
“Icca was perfectly fine ignoring the shadows that leaned for her; she did not want to be acquainted with them.”
“To be fair, readers, the dark that gathered around Icca was not a common dark. Night thickened and curled around her; it reached for her and swaddled her, and in the black depths of the classroom closet, Icca’s thoughts were rapid-fire: I feel I am nowhere, and there are no walls and it just keeps going on forever and ever, and I am so small in it that I am not sure not sure not sure if I am still here at all.”
“An age-old question, dear readers, that the people of Isanghan had been asking themselves for centuries, why witches were born with their affinities. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it, which was unfortunate, since such randomness often makes humans uncomfortable. But another question—could we picture Carousel Rabbit without her crows, or Iccadora Alice Sickle without the dark? In that sense it does not seem as random—it seems a thing of casts and molds.”
“Every second her fear told her she was going to go away, and every second Icca continued. Breathing in the dark.”
“The both of them had grown up in Wonderland. They’d grown up as awful things; wholly horrible girls.”
“The two witches were sleeping in a tree, in the thick black branches shot out of a three-hundred-foot pine trunk. Never in her life had Icca slept so deeply as she did in Wonderland. Never had her dreams been so vivid—senseless and completely irretrievable, yet contained of colors so bright that, in the moment upon waking, she swore she could taste them melting on her tongue.”
“They’d been in a nothing Ward, looking at a nothing future. Now, the world suddenly seemed as vast and endless as a room in total darkness. Icca had been scared of that, once. What would she become, if she conquered this, too?”
“They drifted into one another’s heads so often that most of their thoughts formed with edges already fitted to hold the outline of the other witch. That was their love, their knotted and jagged and strange kind of affection. It pricked and stung and neither of them would like anything less—they were already such barbed girls. Such bramble-wrought souls.”
“Caro used to know in her bones that they thought of each other all of the time.”
“…magic without intention was a burning, volatile thing…”
“I’d remind her of the world she is so sheltered from, and yet its evil she feeds off of like cherries off the stem—”
“I care because I don’t understand how no one else sees it! I care because she got off scot-free, fooled everyone because she has some immunity to the death trace. She shouldn’t have that. She shouldn’t get to kill and then get crowned. She should be—‘ ‘Sent out into Wonderland?’ ‘Yes.’”
“Jageun yuryeong, her mother would call the little Hattie, little ghost…”
“…the Kkuls had never kept it a secret, what teemed in the Dark of their Labyrinth, what could kill even the Jabberwockies who had survived their Wonderland sentence. The Queens—first White, now Red—had made the horror story of Petra’s protection into a revered tale. Witches with their Labyrinth Saints shield. Witches making flesh and mind and Divinity alike teem at their fingertips, and so it didn’t matter that an old King of their bloodline had corrupted the Saints in the first place.”
“Because that’s all they did, those in the lesser Wards, the distant Wards, with their small Walls and false securities. They feared—it was in the air, even if quelled by the notion they might be safe—and then they died.”
“It wasn’t fair, this party, all these people who wouldn’t spend a single day looking over their shoulders. The absolved Jabberwockies that flocked to this Ward, to its Queen, were pathetic, wasted creatures; they’d all stood above Wonderland’s roots, had seen the true nature of this world, and chosen to hide from it. To play pretend, play spectacle.”
“Bowed her head, sent a prayer up to her favorite god, Quiet, who always hovered close. Who was the quality of her veins, the space between the beats of her heart. Who was the state in her head where she found herself as a dreaming being, a holy soul. Who—Hattie knew—awaited her in Wonderland.”
“And it was the senses that one took in the world, that bled its magic, that translated its aspects, which were its deities. And, so, cherished readers. There were so many gods in Hattie’s veins.”
“The beasts were not witches, not anymore. Their amplified Divinity had made them feral, inhuman, but that Divinity was still very much within them. It was still very much them, now. And were Divine things not gods?”
“And the Courts—always scrambling between believing her and ridiculing her, between loving her and hating her. And Hattie knew at some critical point between two such human instincts, love and hatred, there was a chance she’d at last be understood. It’s how she’d come to understand Wonderland. But she knew it was a long shot, with human beings. People were people were ridiculous people, and they lived in their own heads, obsessing over the stories of their lives, making villains and heroes and religious figures of one another. Wonderland, lacking language, didn’t make up stories, didn’t judge her. It didn’t judge anyone. Wonderland was Quiet.”
“They had numbed themselves, to survive the creatures that would seek them out in the depths of their despair.”
“Unnie’s very fucking weird, thought Caro affectionately.”
“And then she went back up—or, dear readers, perhaps down, or sideways, or through… a narrator restricted by language apologizes for the uncertainty of terming particularities of magic, which detests being termed to begin with.”
“Not exactly the same they are, love and hatred, certainly, but oh, dear, certainly not too distant.”
“Both requiring attention, passion to sustain. Both just past that fine, fine line of being alone in one’s own head, and moving over to allow another room.”
“They could blame Wonderland—a sorrowful narrator believes, truly, our darling champions should have.”
“Icca hadn’t wanted to hurt Caro, and Caro hadn’t wanted to hurt Icca, but that’s what they would have done by leaving, by saving themselves.”
“If this were one of Icca’s storybooks, now would be when the hero recognized just how scared they were for the next part, and breathed in the terrible inevitability of all of it, knowing that they must do what must be done, regardless of their mortal fears. This would mark them as brave, which was an admirable trait in storybooks—did the brave ones tend to live longer? Icca hadn’t kept count. It certainly wasn’t the case in this world.”
“’You gave her an idea—what was it she said? Encouraging magic back to the masses, they’ve been scared of it for too long, with the pains and the Saints being super-gross and whatnot. Delcorta, I suppose, didn’t help—she tried to frighten them into pursuing their witchcrafts, but, oh, Icky! You can dazzle them instead!’ Her tone rolling out sickly-sweet. ‘You won’t just be a champion. You’ll be her hero. You’ll be everybody’s hero.’ At this, of course, readers, our dear Iccadora thought, thoroughly appalled, I’m her fucking villain.”
“…and the Queen, with that blank-yet-digging stare, had seen something in her, something to reap.”
“Icca didn’t want Carousel dying ignorant. She wanted to ruin the image of her Queen first, obliterate her faith before sending her off to oblivion.”
“What glory could be found on the other side of agony.”
“The threat of a downpour scented the air like perfume and static.”
“Then she was feeling very wicked indeed and finding, as usual, she very much liked it.”
“It’s a holiday season now! Reject your schooling and live as feral, happy things!”
“And so—her life would be a devouring thing. She’d be an existence as insistent as decay. How pious she was, to want nothing more than to let her magic, her Divinity, swallow her down.”
“There was something particularly warm about being on the floor with a loved one. Carousel adored a good floor-lay.”
Part II
“I am running around in my head, chasing my personality.”
“Yes, she was sitting very still and trying to keep the head—the one that was just her own—above all her—the others. Her others. She was getting to be so many others, now. And Icca had always liked this, dissolving herself. It was in other heads rather than in her storybooks, now, but, oh, how deliciously familiar it felt. Being somewhere else.”
“…she ripped off the roses by their necks, pressing them slick into her faerie book…”
“They didn’t have to live in their own bodies all the time, in their own heads. Icca was so much more than her own head, than her fragility, the circles under her eyes, the sores on her face. She’d never felt more physically close to her crueler qualities. Never felt more seen by her gods.”
“Carousel had been so many people. A sick child, a grieving orphan, a lovestruck girl. What was she now, with her head dropped back, so used to the steady corrosion of her magic, of her youth? Her favorite self, certainly. A butcher. An arrogant bitch. A witch, flocked with her crows, knowing exactly how strange and delightful her power was.”
“…she preferred people to be unsure of her. Uncertainty could be wielded as a tool in and of itself; the smear between fear and reverence birthed less-volatile loyalties.”
“Once upon a time, Alice hunted Rabbit through a forest, which was a Labyrinth, which was a prison, which was a protection, which was her harvesting ground….”
“Icca didn’t care about being good, or being bad, much alike to her deities, and all Their other Selves. She was the magic she possessed, and she really did like how it felt. To let everything spill up and over, to burn down within her own power—all the witches who couldn’t relish the sting were dead by now, or worse, mediocre.”
“Once upon a time, Alice followed Rabbit into Wonderland. What do you get when you have two witches with violent tendencies in love, and you take away the love? Alice still liked Rabbit’s face, the press of her skin, the strangeness of her magic, because she was powerful and thus often bored, and whether it was love or hatred between them, it was always electric, and entertaining for it. You get two witches with violent tendencies. What horror, what horror… Alice still wanted Rabbit in her head, even if Rabbit lost hers. Even if it was Alice taking it away.”
“But perhaps there shone some other truth in that, too. That to find oneself in another wasn’t some rare, serendipitous feat of fate—just the evidence that someone changed, maybe without even realizing it, that they were shifting over parts of themselves to allow this other presence more room. Undoing the nails of floorboards, knocking down walls. When it was all set and over with, what did the original house even look like? More wretched, surely, one must think, one surely had to think, since it was impossible to put things back to where they’d been.
“Just because they hated each other now, it didn’t mean they couldn’t have once meant everything to one another—“
“Her body might be human, but I swear to the gods. Her head… her head is all Wonderland.”
“Ask me what Wonderland feels like! Ask what it feels like—to be so alive! Alive! Alive!”
“She’d never come across an absolved Jabberwocky who didn’t wander back to the Forest at some point or another, telling themselves it was to follow a bounty or indulge themselves in the violence of butchering a Saint.”
“…the roots of Wonderland called to them, that dark, wicked place within which they had never been so terrified, never felt so alive.”
“All acts of bold witches, and Hattie believed those were so few and far between nowadays, and that such rarity was a cause of a lack of Wonderland.”
“Perhaps lesser witches did darker deeds.”
“Because a person would always carry around a place where they had become someone else, the way the gleam of a porcelain vase remembers the furnace.”
“A death trace healed by decay—after all, didn’t decay trail after death, anyway? Soothe it, and ultimately Quiet it, any angry marks the soul had thrashed upon the forgiving flesh, the delicate, proudly formed bones—marks, of course, that no one but those lucky few in Hattie’s bloodline could even think to peer at. Such hidden, sacred sciences—how the elements of the mind affected elements of the body, and thus, the person inhabiting that body was able to affect the world. And threading it all together: magic, which was Divinity, which were the gods, which were, of course, the world, again, rendering everything and everyone, even herself, one grand smear; and Hattie found herself falling apart for the glorious ridiculousness of all of it. Hattie found herself on her knees, in the Labyrinth, in the Quiet.”
“…that desire to dissolve in Wonderland.”
“I want to see what happens to the world when I’m Queen, one day, and I haven’t bothered to unstitch the distinction between what I could do and what I want to do.”
“Surely, she must keep running and running, getting wickeder and wickeder—she must be the villain of this story…”
“They were different, had always been different from one another, but tucked into the corners of the orphanage, tucked hands and souls, it had felt like it couldn’t be so. How strange it was, other people being other people, and familiar.”
“A musing narrator wonders if we should all live with a general terror in our hearts, that one day we might discover that other people are absolutely real, absolutely distinct from ourselves, and as a consequence, are wholly invulnerable to what we might desire from them once such realness and distinction is proven.”
“Walking through the unlit tearoom felt like being a faerie dropped in a glass jewelry box, placed on a high and dark shelf so the cat couldn’t get to it.”
“Hattie is an enigma, and I enjoy her like that. I don’t need truths. I don’t.”
“I think I’d rather know the people I love over having the people I love know me, if I had to choose one. I think I’m more, that way.”
“Maybe Caro hadn’t intended to say all of that. To reveal there, on the blood-and-magic-soaked grass, that she was a heretic, that she found Divinity in other people more than she found Divinity in natural forces—but then, Hattie was a natural force.”
“She’d spent the hours remembering over and over again that she used to know Icca, had started again and again at the thought that she felt she knew Icca now, too, and that it didn’t matter one bit. Nothing between them could ever be forgotten, or burned down, neither their love for one another in their girlhood nor all the hurt they’d inflicted in Wonderland. They couldn’t go back; they could hardly move forward. They kept tripping over the memory of themselves pressed into the other.”
“…white stone and wisteria-threaded perches, their perfumes like sulfur in the slits of her nostrils.”
“Her bloodline threw me to the wolves, and I ate them alive—I’m the scariest thing the Kkuls ever created. And I am the only one of their monsters that’s going to make them pay for it.”
“’We can’t ever leave Wonderland. We can’t. We carry it everywhere.’ She was laughing. She was sobbing. What relief. What protection.”
“Iccadora Alice Sickle wanted everything. Ruin, and Rabbit. To love and hate her and think of her and kill her. She wanted everything….”
“Because she was scared of being all alone without Delcorta, at the head of a country infested with monsters. And because, perhaps, she could.”
“We really are just ourselves, and one another, over and over again. What bliss. What bliss.”
“She was not only someone. She was someone powerful, and in a world like the one she happened to exist in, it rendered her Divine.”
“…an empathy so carved that it ached. Caro had loved like that, once. Loved so fully that she thought she wouldn’t be anything at all if Icca were gone.”
“It was a past dead and done. They might remember, with vicious clarity, what they’d once been to one another, but it didn’t matter if they’d thought that what they felt had been the closest thing to Divinity, more than any other force in the world, more than the magic in their own veins. Because Icca and Caro—and Icca truly thought Caro must think so, too—didn’t want to be who they once were: lovesick girls, scared girls.”