TRIGGER WARNING: THIS BOOK CONTAINS A LOT OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE


I have a complicated relationship with retellings. I always want to love them, but more often than not, end up feeling severely disappointed because I hold the original tales at such a high standard (see: The Lunar Chronicles) Like Beauty and The Beast and Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland happens to be one of my favorites, so it was no wonder that I was a little skeptical going into this one.

It turns out that I didn't need to be so worried, because I freaking loved this. Alice doesn't take place in the Wonderland we all know and love, but in a gothic-fantasy town called Old City, where Magicians once roamed free, and is now run by many underworld bosses and their respective gangs. The characters in this story aren't the ones we know and love either. Alice is now a twenty-six year old woman who, after disappearing when she was sixteen, reappeared later, with "blood dripping down her thighs", missing memories, hysterically raving about a "Rabbit". Upon her reappearance, she was deemed mad, and locked up in an asylum in the Old City, away from her parents and her home back in the New City.

She eventually finds a friend and maybe-lover in crazed ax-murderer in the cell next to hers - a mad, yet kind, man named Hatcher.

The story starts with the night a fire breaks out in the asylum, giving Alice and Hatcher a chance to escape their prison and, perhaps, their years of suffering. But they're not the only ones to escape. Something dark and evil is set free that night, something that has an inexplicable tie to Hatcher; The Jabberwock.

The Jabberwock is bad news, and his escape means complete destruction. Alice and Hatcher are the only ones who can stop it. Their quest to find the only weapon that can defeat the Jabberwock leads Alice and Hatcher into the lairs of familiar, but completely recrafted characters. Namely, Cheshire, The Walrus, The Caterpillar, and The Rabbit; the bosses who run Old City.

The reason why it didn't get a five star rating from me, surprisingly enough, wasn't the rape-y-ness. It was the ending.

Let me explain.

Rape and sexual violence bother me - in real life as well as in fiction.

That being said, it wasn't a deal breaker for me with this book, because I understood the point of it. Sure, this book would have been as gory and as dark without a lot of the sexual violence - but then its villains would have been nowhere near as terrifying. Because that's the thing about the villains in this book - it's not their magic or their power that makes them monstrous, it's their dirtiest, vilest, human qualities. They snatch girls up from their homes, so that they can use them and sell their bodies.

If you took away the magical elements, everything that happened to Alice was something that could have happened in our world. And that's what makes this so powerful.

I removed a star because the ending was anticlimactic, and the encounters with the bosses were all a little too rushed for my taste. I was happy that the tale didn't end the way I expected, but the conclusion fell flat after the epic buildup, and the pacing towards the end of the book was much too fast.

Which is a shame, because this was such a creepy little book, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. Give it a try, if you can stomach the darkness.
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