I would like to have a funeral for this book. The squandered potential is truly staggering. The framework was there: A young black American suffers a traumatic loss, and "discovers" a parallel reality where creatures born from nightmares ravage the land. As this girl's community suffers more tragedy, as she falls out with friends and family, as she feels hopeless and powerless, the nightmare horde rises in strength. She goes through all the stages of grief, denying that the monsters have sway in her world (or that they're even real, maybe for a time she wonders if grief has made her hallucinate), channeling her anger into combat, surrendering to tears and allowing the darkness to consume her... Until the safety of her loved ones is paramount, and she rallies the strength to confront her fears and sorrows. The power of friendship gives her the strength to vanquish the nightmares. A brilliant, fantasy tale to help process the grief and daily uncertainty the black community feels (and feels is overlooked), and a strong Woman of Color readers could champion.

I must stress: THIS is NOT that book.

It could have been, but alas.... L.L. McKinney didn't build her own world. She didn't make a fantasy realm to get lost in, or a cast of characters with depth, or a bridge between the two to reflect how fantasy is just a mirror of humanity. Nope. What I can tell you is that L.L. McKinney has seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Disney live-action Alice in Wonderland, and decided to mash all of those up into a fanfiction. The references are blatant, names DROPPED! When Alice slays monsters, she shouts Sailor Moon's catchphrase, "Cosmic moon power!" Instead of characterizing Alice's allies, Dee and Dum, the book says they're "Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer" times two. Our heroes need a macguffin gem, so Alice pulls it out of a mirror, a la Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. When she pretends to hand the macguffin gem over to the villain, she actually slight-of-hands him "a time-turner". When the villain gets mad, he turns her friend into a Balrog (which Alice defeats with the equivalent of a "You shall not pass!"). Constant pop culture references. Heck, the whole book is a loose Alice in Wonderland retelling! Entire plot and characters are just ripped off from other works.

Or, skipped over, as if the author didn't know how to write them out. There was a civil war in Wonderland that our heroes reference, but the reader never gets to see firsthand, no flashbacks, no switched PoV, no nothing. Alice was trained for 3 months by Hatta in how to fight monsters, totally skipped over and implied. She then went on monster-hunting missions for a year, also skipped over. Sometimes Alice gets knocked out, and wakes up a day later to discover that her people have continued the plot without her... Why?... You don't think the audience wants to SEE how this everyday muggle transformed into an angry warrior and then into a grieving-but-healing protector of others?!?! That should be the story! Why are there so many blanks where the STORY ought to be?!?!

And nothing is done to bridge the Wonderland story to the Black Lives Matter story. A lot is SAID about how human dreams/nightmares fuel Wonderland. But Alice's mounting, anxiety-inducing, personal problems never result in a correlated rise in monsters. If anything, there are large chunks of the book where our "heroes" traipse easily across Wonderland and just eat and sleep and stare at the sky. There are equally large chunks of the real world plot devoted to melodrama: Missing curfew or a party because duty called; stressing over crushes or dirty clothes; sooo many "Eat. You'll feel better." scenes... And the allegedly dangerous stakes that should exist in both worlds, don't, BECAUSE MAGIC! Our heroes develop super healing, they can make superhero landings and take no fall damage, they have an alchemist on call who can heal them all with potions. The stakes don't matter.

Part of the magic of this universe is in words: Spellcasters are called Poets and their spells are said in verse. Alice could have been a fan of R&B, could have been a poet and a Poet, could have LITERALLY saved her community by being the voice of her people! She could have started with The Vorpal Blade and come to realize that the pen is mightier than the sword. It would have been a great metaphor for how she learned to deal with grief: That lashing out in anger was no different from living in fear, and what she needed to do was be open and unburden her heart.
But not only was this opportunity ALSO missed, but the book itself failed to have any homage to poetry or writing. If anything, the prose was juvenile. Again, it felt ripped straight from a fanfiction. Alice's voice frequently bled into the prose, so phrases like "gonna" or "tallass" were used, unironically, in the prose. If the book had been done FIRST PERSON, this could have been done artistically! Letting Alice be the voice her community needs, by letting her also NARRATE HER OWN DANG STORY, would have been - sorry to keep using the phrase - ... poetic.

Finally, and this may not annoy the majority of readers, but it annoyed me: The original Alice in Wonderland/Alice Through the Looking Glass DOES have many zany, fantastical moments, BUT at its core, it's about a little girl processing the concept of growing up. She wonders whether the lessons she learns and the things grown-ups fixate over are important or nonsense. It is about Alice CHOOSING the person she wants to be.
A Blade So Black honored THAT beloved classic... by making Wonderland into a carnival of goofy hijinx: You can play with fluffy colors, and drink metal, and the trees have eyeballs! And you never ever ever ever EVER have to question yourself, or the things you've been told, and forge your own path because LOOK OVER THERE a giant bubble falls!
I cannot stress enough.... that Wonderland... is NOT actually nonsense. It is not meant to be whackadoodle cartoon world. Rather, its whole point was two-fold: To embrace the creative whimsy of children in a fairytale-like atmosphere, while simultaneously showing us that WE are the nonsensical ones, we the adults, and all the arbitrary rules we make! It would have been AMAZING to have Angry Alice confront HER reality with that same realization! "This world has beat me down and held me back for arbitrary reasons: My skin, my hair, my gender, my age, my finances, my street, my music, my words... I am not limited by their labels, and I do not recognize their hold on me. I can imagine better. I can make something better. I decide who I am."

BUT WE DIDN'T GET THAT STORY!!!!

I want to cry over how much this book could have been. If only it had found its own voice. Instead, it had nothing to say. ;____; A staggering loss for literature.