Alice

This story is a twist on a familiar Lewis Carroll tale.

It is unsettling in a dementia-like way, spinning the reader from the known into the unknown with just enough of the old story to keep them from tipping completely off balance, hope and dark humor always alive. 

This book helped me with the twisting of fact and fiction in my own books, where I used many of my own family incidents (and fears), but gave them to fictional characters with their own generational slant.

I’ve read a lot of Alice in Wonderland books, but this Alice just got deliciously dark, yet it all served a purpose. The world could be vicious at times, but that only made me more and more intrigued about what would happen next. I also like the interesting spin on this classic along with the tight bond between The Mad Hatter and Alice. He was a lot different than we’ve ever seen him and so was Alice, but they were the perfect team in this mad world.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have always been among my childhood favorites, so much so that most retellings of these stories often fall flat for me, but Christina Henry pulls off something truly special in her book Alice. Alice, now an adult locked in an insane asylum, one day escapes with her companion Hatcher, an ax-murderer who loves her fiercely and would do anything to protect her. Dangers lurk around every corner as they travel through a city run by various nefarious crime bosses, from the Walrus to the White Rabbit, and on their journey to… show more.