Only when the White Rabbit kicks her down the rabbit hole does Alice realize that the magical land she visited as a child is real.
But all is not well in Wonderland.
The Ace of Spades has taken over Wonderland and is systematically dismantling all that makes it wonderful. Plain is replacing wondrous, logical is replacing magical, and reason is destroying madness. Alice decides she must help the Mad Hatter and all those fighting to keep Wonderland wonderful.
But how can she face such danger when she is just a girl?
Alice must journey across the stars to unite an army. She discovers that fairy tales are real in the magical world beyond the rabbit hole. But they are not the fairy tales she knows.
Fairy tales have dangers and adventures of their own, and Alice must overcome the trials of these old stories if she wants to unite the lands against Ace.
With the help of Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Snow White and heroes old and new, Alice may have the strength to take back Wonderland.
Rating: 3/5 Stars
I was kindly provided with a copy of this book
via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Alice Takes
Back Wonderland is a new book by author David D. Hammons and it’s about Alice
(duh), who visited Wonderland when she was only nine years old, but as time went
by she was convinced her adventure was nothing but her imagination playing
games on her.
Now at
seventeen years old, Alice discovers that her hallucinations were in fact very
real, and she’ll be transported back to Wonderland to stop a new evil;
everything that makes the magical place so especial is being destroyed, and
wonderland is becoming more and more like the regular world Alice comes from.
It will be up to her and the friends and foes she finds on the road to stop it
before it’s too late.
I’ve got to
say, I loved the idea of the “big evil” being loosing Wonderland’s magic. It
was an interesting contrast for Alice, who had experienced both the real world and
the fantasy one, and to see this magical and crazy place being turned into the
sad reality we all know.
As far as
characters go, Alice was a decent one, she was ready to do what was necessary
to save Wonderland but for some reason, I couldn’t connect with her. As much as
I tried, I never felt like I got to know her. Who was this girl? What did she
like to do with her free time? What were her hopes and dreams? We never get to
see her and that makes it difficult to follow the story because I wasn’t as
invested as I should be; I should want for Alice to succeed, to win and free
Wonderland but my heart wasn’t on it.
There were
a few problems with the pacing too. At some point things would be really slow
and then suddenly everything would pick up in an instant at full speed and then
down again. It made it hard to follow.
There were
some secondary characters who were nice and a fun addition. In that sense the
book reminded me a lot to Once Open a Time, it combined different fairy tales
like many from the Grimm brothers into the Wonderland setting in an easy and
simple way. The author did a good job mashing those ideas together.
As far as
the plot goes, I do wish the loss of magic and Alice’s insanity had been
explored further. After Alice escapes Wonderland when she was a child, she has
convinced herself that everything that happened there was a hallucination and
when she comes back to that world I was expecting for her to question her
sanity. To keep on wondering whether Wonderland was real or if she was going
crazy again, but she accepts it rather quickly “Oh so wonderland is real? Ok!”
it didn’t felt natural.
To sum up, Alice
Takes Back Wonderland is a good fantasy read with a few issues of pacing that
don’t keep you from enjoying a well-crafted story.
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