Let's talk Alice (in Wonderland)

Just a quick point I want to make before I get into this post: I normally write my first drafts in Microsoft Word, and then I copy & paste them into Blogger where I read through and edit them. Something happens in the formatting when I copy & paste them that messes with my paragraphs, and I don't know how to fix it in Blogger... So, sorry lmao.

           So, I recently read Wonderland by Juno Dawson and, while this post isn’t specifically about that book, it inspired this post. What I basically want to talk about is Alice in Wonderland as a general concept. I realise that’s vague, and I don’t know how to be more specific, I just have thoughts and I’m going to go through them. You’re welcome. Also, this post is going to be a mess, I’m saying that now. It’s going to be more of a stream of consciousness than anything else, so, good luck making sense of it.

        I will say, just as a broad sweeping statement, I like Alice in Wonderland. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to be super specific, we love that. I don’t remember when I read the book for the first time, but I read it, and liked it. And since then, I ended up broadening my Alice content into other, not necessarily spin-off books. But books, that weren’t necessarily directly related to the Lewis Carroll Alice, that were Alice adjacent or Alice inspired. Wow, we love that. Did that sentence even make sense? To me it did. Good luck to you if it didn't.

        Here’s a rundown of what Alice content I currently own, whether you want it or not. So, I have played, and own, both American McGee’s Alice and Alice Madness Returns. They’re the only bits of non-literature that are on this list, in terms of Alice content, everything else is a book. So, I have two versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Why do I have two versions? Because one of them was a really pretty hardback that I had to buy – despite the fact I don’t like hardback books.

(the hardback mentioned above)

       We love that energy. As for the rest of my stuff, I have Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, which is, according to the front cover, a collection of his poems. Wonderland by Juno Dawson, After Alice by Gregory Maguire, Alice & Red Queen by Christina Henry, then, finally, Queen of Hearts, Blood of Wonderland and War of the Cards by Colleen Oakes.

        So, here’s the thing, have I read all of these books? No. But the ones I have read have definitely varied in quality. Your boy hasn’t enjoyed all of them. The bits of Alice media (book-wise) I have consumed are both the games, Alice Adventures, Looking Glass, After Alice and Wonderland. And… not all books are created equally, let’s just say that.

        I'll cover the games first, however. So, I played Alice Madness Returns before actually reading the original books, and the game was what made me read them. And, for me, this game is my peak of Alice content. I don’t know what it is, Madness Returns is literally just a hack’n’slash game set in a version of Wonderland that, for lack of better phrasing, is melting and falling apart. I was a fan of it. It also runs on this aesthetic of a dark and gritty version of Wonderland that I noticed is a common thing that people take when they’re going to do their own version of anything Wonderland. I don’t know, either way, Alice Madness Returns is one of my favourite games of all time. There was that point, you’re welcome.

        From memory, I think I then read Alice’s Adventures after playing Alice Madness Returns. I might not have done, I might have played American McGee’s Alice, but I don’t know. Either way, I enjoyed both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. That’s it, I don’t have a lot to say about them, despite being, probably, the most famous and well known of Carroll’s work. When I think of my favourite things I’ve read, I don’t immediately go to either of these stories. But I don’t think of them when I think of things that I don’t like either.

        As for American McGee’s Alice. I remember enjoying it, when I played it, but not nearly as much as Alice Madness Returns. That may well have been down to the fact that American McGee’s Alice was released, originally, in 2000, eleven years before Madness Returns. So, maybe, I didn’t like it because it was older, and just generally not as good. But what I will say about American McGee’s was that I think I liked some of the locations more than Madness Returns. Do I remember any of those locations? Not really. I remember an area where I had to climb a big hill with a river that I loved, but that's it.

         Okay, so, while I was looking up the games for this post, turns out there’s a sequel in development called Alice: Asylum! Hello? When was I going to find this out? And it’s projected to be released October 2021? Everything I found was speculative, but the concept art is kind of a serve, and you’d best believe a bitch will play it when it’s released. (If it’s on a platform I own lol.)

       That detour taken, I’ll just say, I haven’t read any of the Colleen Oakes or Christina Henry books yet, so I can’t really give my thoughts on them.

          What I can give my thoughts on is After Alice and Wonderland.

          So, After Alice… It wasn’t my favourite… It’s my least favourite bit of Alice adjacent content that I have consumed by a sizable margin. For a little context of what I thought I was getting into with this book, I’ve copy & pasted the Amazon description of the book just below:

 

            “When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice's disappearance?

Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings -and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll's enduring tale. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice but, arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.

Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice.”

 

 

        So, the description gives the impression that this book will follow Ada, Alice’s friend, as she goes to Wonderland. And, in defence of the book, it does follow Ada. But it only follows Ada for half of the book. It’s one of those dual perspective books, and the other perspective is of another character, not in Wonderland, but back in London. And that was my problem with the book. The description has no mention of this like I, and many other people in the reviews of this book, thought. And, I won’t lie, I didn’t care about what was happening in the chapters that didn’t follow Ada, because they weren’t why I was reading the book. So, I remember getting about a third of way into the book and then I just started completely skipping the chapters that didn’t follow Ada, and sure, I liked the chapters following Ada, but the chapters that didn’t follow her were just so wildly differing in tone, that it just dragged the whole book down for me. And even though I didn't read those chapters, I still don't feel like I missed out on anything.

        And the last Alice Adjacent thing I have to mention, and the book that inspired this post, is Wonderland by Juno Dawson, that I read recently. So, Wonderland follows Alice (so creative), a transgender girl, whose friend, Bunny, goes missing, and Alice goes on a mission to find Bunny. Throughout the story, Alice finds an invitation to an exclusive party, known as Wonderland, that was addressed to Bunny, so obviously, Alice goes to Wonderland.

        I didn’t entirely know what I was getting into when I bought the book, the description was vague enough to tell me it was Alice-inspired, but not exactly what happens. I ended up looking up some other reviews online, and there was a one-star review that used the word ‘groan’ in brackets so many times at how just about all of the main characters and their names were puns on the actual characters in Alice. And let me tell you, reading that review absolutely SENT me, like, girl, what were you expecting from an Alice-inspired book? For the Mad Hatter to actually just be some middle-aged balding man called Dave? Anyway, I went to that person’s profile and that majority of the reviews they had written didn’t go over two stars, so that told me the kind of person they were…

      I, personally, was fine with all of the names being puns of the original characters. Because I’m a clown, and a fool, I wouldn’t have known who any of the characters were meant to be if their names hadn’t been puns. So, for me, it was a nice, “oh, haha, he’s meant to be Caterpillar,” moment when I realised who each of the characters were meant to be.

        Anyway, I think that’s it for this post. Was it a mess? Absolutely. But I did say right at the beginning that it would just be more of a stream of consciousness with less sensical, thought out thoughts. You knew what you were getting into when you read those first few paragraphs.

Okay, bye!