After finishing this I see now it’s often referred to Alice in Wonderland meets Buffy, and I was thinking it felt exactly like that while reading it. While certainly sophomoric in some elements of craft—primarily worldbuilding, pacing, and diction—I found this to be a pretty solid effort.

What I liked the most about it is the intrusion of reality into the narrative, which surprised me because people say this is an Alice retelling. Which is why I didn’t pick it up until I was sure I didn’t remember much about that story. I’ve not read the classic and my only familiarity is the Disney film, which is now pretty hazy. You’ll notice I can’t speak to how well this maps to the original Alice story at all. I wasn’t expecting that and have no investment on that front.

But I do remember she falls down the hole and is there for some time. In this, Alice has to balance her secret as a person who can fight nightmares with her home-life, primarily her relationship with her mother (the stand out relationship dynamics captured in the book), but also with her friends. I think this recreates the Buffy dynamics and also smartly juxtaposes Alice’s experience in the story I know, with this one. She doesn’t have the luxury of falling into daydreaming and waking up, which could be an effective parallel to marginalized people typically simply not having the same kind of free time, among other things, as the privileged.

This does create some pacing issues. The fantastical element is thrown at you up front, and it’s jarring. Then the down beats and up beats of plot feel like a catch-up game, trying to fill in the reader on the world, while trying to balance the conflicts in play. Some of the terms are a bit cringe as well, such as her inner power enabling her to combat nightmares being called, I think, “muchness”, if I recall correctly. I think this skews toward the younger side of YA, based on setting terms like that.

I think that’s actually a good move, though, even if it’s not how I like the setting, it’s fairly clear this book wasn’t written for me, anyway. I think it’s great that Alice is a character with really strong cultural touchstones but feels completely her own character in her own culture and heritage. For all the ways those touchstones alienate marginalized people, this feels written to include them and make them feel seen.