Alice in the Country of Hearts: The Mad Hatter’s Late Night Tea Party 1

QuinRose / Riko Sakura – Seven Seas Entertainment – 2013 – 2 volumes

Ehh… eh.  This one’s only okay so far.  It doesn’t have a lot of story re-hash, which is good.  All that’s passed over pretty quickly.  It’s also another rare non-Fujimaru volume, and I really like Riko Sakura’s artwork.

It’s a fairly typical Blood story.  Peter White is acting crazy, and drives Alice out of Heart Castle.  After a brief stay at the Clock Tower, she stumbles across the Hatter Mansion and meets all the characters there for the first time (it’s been a long time since I read a Hearts story with a fresh start, so this was fairly novel).

From there, she starts falling for Blood, of course.  He’s a tease, and while he’s still harsh here, he’s not nearly as much of a jerk as he usually is, which is a huge plus.  Let’s see… I suppose the main conflict is that there is a very early, very heavily-but-not-explicitly-stated sexual relationship between Alice and Blood.  This is rare in these books, so I was a little taken aback.  There is a slight dodge, in that the scene is prefaced by a dream-meeting with Nightmare, who tells Alice if she’s dreaming, she should enjoy it more and dive a little deeper, at which point she promptly and unambiguously hooks up with Blood.  This could be a dream, but later it sounds like the two are somewhat involved, so I don’t think it is.

Alice wants their relationship to be casual (she doesn’t want to deal with falling in love), which Blood consents grudgingly to.  Later, she sees Blood in the rose garden with Vivaldi, thinks the two of them are involved, and begins to suspect that Blood is playing around with her.

And… this will be resolved next time.  Again, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary.  Pretty straightforward relationship drama, and I did like that Blood was nicer than usual.  I like it a lot better than most of the one-shots, and pretty much all the Blood stories I’ve read except for the 6-volume main storyline.  So that’s a big plus.  But I still like the Nightmare books the best.