The second installment of Frank Beddor’s Wonderland trilogy finds Queen Alyss learning that defeating her Aunt Redd for the role of Queen didn’t mean everything afterward would be easy in comparison. Her Aunt Redd may be gone, having leapt into the Heart Crystal with The Cat and disappearing, but no one knows if it’s for good or if she’ll find a way back to Wonderland to challenge Alyss for the queendom again.

It certainly seems like Redd may be on the verge of returning. Her army of Glass Eyes have continued attacking Alyss’s soldiers, and Glass Eyes are programmed to follow only their leader’s orders… and their leader has always been Redd. What Alyss doesn’t realize is that King Arch of Boarderland, Wonderland’s neighbor, has decided now is the time to rise up against Alyss and claim Wonderland for his own. He’s devised a plan to wipe out all of Alyss’s armies and to eradicate Imagination altogether so that everyone will be equal under his rule. His plan is WILMA, his Weapon of Inconceivable Loss and Massive Annihilation. Comprised of strands of silk from each of Wonderland’s caterpillar oracles, WILMA will destroy the Heart Crystal and the power of Imagination in Wonderland. But in order for it to work, Arch needs Hatter Maddigan, the top member of the Millinery squad of soldiers to set it in motion. To force his cooperation, he kidnaps Hatter’s daughter, Homburg Molly, and holds her hostage.

Arch doesn’t believe Redd will return, but Redd’s a determined villainess. She understands the Heart Crystal, and the fact that ideas that are passed into the Heart Crystal often find their way out to other worlds, such as Earth. And it is on Earth one day that a painter discovers he has lost his ability to paint the landscapes he so loves. Instead, every time he sets brush to canvas, he finds himself painting the image of a woman and a large feline. The harder he tries to stop, the more the images come to him, until one day he has painted a life-size portrait of Redd and The Cat, and they break through and find themselves free of the Heart Crystal and existing in France. Redd sets to work amassing an army of followers on Earth and finding the portals back to Wonderland — the puddles that exist where no puddles should exist. These portals will bring her back to Wonderland through the Pool of Tears, where she will challenge her niece again for the throne.

So Alyss doesn’t have a very easy start to her Queenship. Even though she has managed to rebuild Wonderland to be almost as glorious as it once was under her mother’s reign, she still has the threat of her Aunt Redd returning, and to top that, King Arch is plotting his coup, and her personal bodyguard, Homburg Molly, has been kidnapped. At least she has the love of her life, Dodge the palace guardsmen, to brighten her days, but even he is still focused on getting revenge at all costs against The Cat for the murder of his father, and it is obvious that he is willing to put his life in danger at every moment to get it. All of these problems are coming at her at once, and Alyss isn’t sure her Imagination will be strong enough to defeat them all.

I thought the use of the Heart Crystal as a means to “birth” Redd and The Cat into Earth similar to the way creative inventions find their way there to be a clever way to bring Redd back after her defeat in the last story. For a while, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this book. Nothing was surprising — I did predict all that was coming, such as Homburg Molly being Hatter’s daughter and her mother Weaver still being alive. With a title like Seeing Redd, it wasn’t a surprise that Redd found her way back to Earth. What I didn’t see, however , (spoiler ahead) was the end of the book paralleling the end of Imagination in Wonderland, leaving Alyss and Redd unable to use their powers of Imagination to fight each other, and therefore creating the perfect opportunity for King Arch to step in with his army and take Wonderland by force. I also didn’t expect Jack of Diamond’s fate to come so soon either. So by the time the book was over, I was won over by the story, and looking forward to the last book in the trilogy, Arch Enemy.