The Myth: Alice was an ordinary girl who stepped through the looking glass and entered a fairy-tale world invented by Lewis Carroll in his famous storybook. The Truth: Wonderland is real. Alyss Heart is the heir to the throne, until her murderous aunt Redd steals the crown and kills Alyss? parents. To escape Redd, Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, must flee to our world through the Pool of Tears. But in the pool Alyss and Hatter are separated. Lost and alone in Victorian London, Alyss is befriended by an aspiring author to whom she tells the violent, heartbreaking story of her young life. Yet he gets the story all wrong. Hatter Madigan knows the truth only too well, and he is searching every corner of our world to find the lost princess and return her to Wonderland so she may battle Redd for her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts. (Amazon)
Reviewed by L. Danielle
So, I thought Tim Burton had made Alice in Wonderland stand
on its head, but that was before I read THE LOOKING GLASS WARS.
Alyss heart the seven year old princess of Wonderland is a
precocious young girl quite in the habit of using her magical gifts- her
imagination- for her own amusement. Of course, no one would mind so much if she
didn’t find it amusing to harass the palace staff and cause cakes to fall out
of the sky. The queen fears that Alyss may not to take to the White Imagination
used to fuel the queendom (Wonderland has always been ruled by a queen) and may
tend towards Black Imagination- the very kind of Imagination that caused Redd
Heart, the queen’s elder sister, to lose her rightful place as queen and
instead find herself banished to the Chessboard Desert.
However, the queen finds herself with much bigger worries than
her young daughter’s propensity towards childish tricks when Redd Heart makes
an unexpected appearance at the little princess’s birthday party. The palace is
thrown into chaos as war breaks out on all sides with the Wonderlanders
woefully unprepared for the onslaught of violence. Hatter Madigan, the queen’s
body guard and perhaps the coolest mind in the melee, is given just one job:
protect the princess.
Running from the Cat, Redd’s nine-lived assassin, Hatter and
Alyss find themselves in the Pool of Tears (which no one has ever come back
from alive). The Pool acts as a portal between worlds and when Alyss finds her
way out she is deposited on the unforgiving streets of London while Hatter
finds himself in Paris.
Many events take place from there; Hatter attempts to find
the princess by travelling the world one hat shop at a time, and Alyss is
eventually taken off the streets and into the Liddell home where she is renamed
Alice Liddell. The princess (and perhaps Wonderland’s only hope of salvation)
though eventually coming to love her adopted family feels isolated because no
one believes her stories of where she is from, and she’s lost her ability to
Imagine.
The story follows Alyss as she befriends and is betrayed by
the author Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), is forced to grow up in one world
and rescue another, and convince her best friend that maybe going on a
psychopathic rampage against his own mortal enemy isn’t necessarily in
anybody’s best interest.
Overall, I loved this book. It had great characters and
provided a fantastic new twist to one of the most classic works of literature
to grace a bookshelf. It grabbed me from page one and I coasted easily through
the entire trilogy. Also, there are some light steampunk elements that add just
the right hint of geekiness to the novel.
Market: Young Adult
Language: None that I
recall, but there may have been a small amount.
Sensuality: None
Violence: Um, yeah,
there’s definitely that what with all the wars and assassins and everything,
but it’s never gory.
Mature Themes: None
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