After Alice

The book has a see-through dust jacket and the actual cover and goes all away around showing a map of part of London.

Before I bought the book I looked at various reviews of it on Amazon and saw how they were pretty much split between those who liked the book and those who didn't. I'm going to have to join the group that didn't like the book.

The book tried to do two things: first, tell a story about Alice's sister and the type of Victorian behavior that she was subject to as far as females having low status. Ada is the other girl in the book and both of the girls have some very annoying people in their lives and houses.

The third main character is Siam, a black youth who had been a slave and was brought to England by an American. All of this was to cover the examination of the culture of the time and, in that, it did too little. The problem here is that the book was trying to do two things at the same time, the culture aspect and the Wonderland aspect, and in doing that it didn't treat either one deeply enough.

The Wonderland aspect, where Ada, Alice and Siam end up there, had a couple of sort of bright spots but on the whole just didn't work. Siam, caught stealing a chess piece (racist? Blacks are thieves?) gets to Wonderland on his own. Ada teams up with the White Queen and ends up in a zoo (definitely weird) and sees Humpty Dumpty with a group of marionettes who use kites to travel (again, weird). I use the term weird rather than strange. To me, strange applies to Alice in Wonderland itself as far as how the people acted but in a way it still makes sense. In this book it's weird because there's no real reason for what goes on and it doesn't make any kind of Wonderland sense (sense in Wonderland, of course, not meaning sense in the regular world.)

Thus, to me, the book was weak in both aspects of what it was trying to do. It was an all-right read but that's about it .

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Main Alice in Wonderland index page