Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I forced my way through this book, determined to see if the plot would ever emerge and anything brought forward, resolved. No. This is a really mean book. Strip away the Alice in Wonderland setting of illusions and "everything is just so wacky", you are left with a book with the poor Ophelia "sold" or "given" as a bride to a foreign land where she not only doesn't know her future husband, but nothing about the customs or her future. Ok, we see that quite often in YA lit. She'll win over key people, best the bullies, and win the respect of the good people. Well, what happens when our plucky heroine goes to a place where she is beaten, ignored, worked to exhaustion, drugged, hypnotized by evil children to hopefully perform murderous acts against her future family, etc. Basically, there are no good people (with maybe one exception but even that is a fleeting favor). Chapter after chapter, the plot became lost in the descriptions of all the weird topsy turvy, drugged, illusions. I mean, really. Nothing got resolved, defined, or explained. It only got meaner, more violent, more abusive for Ophelia. We are left in the middle of it. After going to two places to await her marriage, she has to keep moving because she is being beaten, abused and manipulated to the point we travel to an even more bizarre place so even more threats and violence can take place. I am not skittish of violence or require YA to be sugar coated. However, it must make sense within the plot and move the story forward. It just seems gratuitous here. Trigger Warning: Child Abuse and Neglect rampant. Violence against women and children performed and accepted as normal behavior.