The prequel to Alice in Wonderland, Marissa Meyer's Heartless is set in the kingdom of Hearts--one of the lands Through the Looking Glass, populated by any number of impossible creatures. The daughter of two nobles, Catherine Pinkerton wishes for nothing more than her own bakery. From her parents' perspective, however, this is unthinkable--because baking is servant's work, but more importantly, because the happy (if witless) King of Hearts has taken an enormous liking to Catherine. While Cath's parents are determined to make her queen, Cath herself is not too keen on the idea. She doesn't want to be queen, especially if she has to marry the King of Hearts, who is much older than her and who she doesn't love in the least. She wants to make her parents proud, yet she wants to live her life and marry for love.

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When it becomes clear during a ball that the king is about to announce his intention to marry her, Cath panics and flees from the palace. She is rescued by the new court joker, a handsome and mysterious young man named Jest. Jest helps her home, where Cath's parents arrive hours later, furious and entirely out of sorts--and not just because the king's proposal was ruined. Right after Cath fled the palace, a Jabberwock attacked--the first of these monsters to be seen in years.

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After Jest whisks Cath away in the night to attend a truly mad tea party with a hatter named Hatta, she feels as though she knows the joker, though she cannot begin to imagine who he really is. While juggling the king's unwanted courtship, her desire to open her bakery, Sir Peter Peter's strange pumpkins, and the now-frequent attacks from the Jabberwock, Cath finds herself falling in love with Jest. But in the land where anything is possible, the terms of Fate might just make the life Cath has dreamed for her impossible.