The Collectors’ Society (Collectors' Society, #1)

by Heather Lyons

[Cocktails and Books]

As usual, Heather Lyons has blown me away. THE COLLECTOR'S SOCIETY is beyond amazing and had me wondering, many times, if I wasn't remembering, certain characters or certain storylines within one of the classic books the author weaves throughout this story (I'm sure my traveling partner in Vegas this weekend was tired of me asking her the names of characters to test if I was remembering correctly or not). Heather Lyons is a master storyteller and manages to coax readers into her riveting stories from practically the first page.

THE COLLECTOR'S SOCIETY gives us an awesome twist on Alice in Wonderland. When we meet Alice, she's in an asylum suffering from what appears to be a psychotic break, in the 1800's. But then she's given an opportunity to leave the asylum and saved Wonderland, the world that broke her and where she left her heart. She ends up in modern day New York City and with a group who's been charged to with trying to stop whoever is deleting literary timelines. Alice has moments where she wonders if she really is crazy or if what these people are saying is true. But as she spends more time with her new partner, Finn Van Brunt, she finds herself drawn to him in a way that is both disturbing and wonderful, and discovering she may have found the one place where she actually belongs.

There are so many wonderful things to say about these characters, that I probably won't be able to do them justice. Many of them, taken from books from our childhood, are so much more than they were in the pages of whatever work of fiction we were introduced to them through. Most of them aren't the happy go lucky characters we remember. Instead each of them has a little something broken in them and struggle with who they were, as depicted on the page, versus who they are now in the modern world. It makes them all instantly likable (I especially love Mary....who's lack of filter often caused some laugh out loud moments).

Alice was special. Her heartbreak and sorrow were almost a secondary character to her. You knew she mourned leaving Wonderland, but at the same time she was terrified of it. As a reader, you needed to know more of her story. Wanting to know how she ended up in the asylum where Mr. Van Brunt found her. But as she got to know her partner at the society, Finn, she started to become a different person. One who was confident in herself and trusted the people who surrounded her...which was much different than she was used to. It wasn't until she went back to Wonderland that we learned Alice's full story and witnessed Alice saying goodbye to her past and hello to the future she desperately wanted.

There is more to come with this series. Alice may have gotten through her story, but I have a strong feeling Huckleberry Finn's story is going to be a bit more heartbreaking and angsty than what we had with Alice.