She Treads Softly: After Alice

Friday, October 30, 2015

After Alice

After Alice by Gregory Maguire

Harper Collins: 10/27/15
eBook review copy, 288 pages
ISBN-13: 9780060548957

After Alice by Gregory Maguire is a recommended rewrite of Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from a different point of view.

This adventure in Wonderland features Ada, a friend of Alice, and Lydia, Alice's sister. Ada is trying to find Alice when she falls down the rabbit hole herself and, following in Alice's footsteps, she encounters the same inhabitants of Wonderland and a few new ones. While Ada is meeting and conversing with all manner of strange creatures, Lydia is dealing with her own issues, including Miss Armstrong, the governess looking for Ada, and Siam, a boy visiting her father with Charles Darwin.

This tale is decidedly written for adults who remember the classic tale and who can appreciate the word play involved in Wonderland and in the formal 19th century language. The action alternates between the two main characters, Ada and Lydia, and the two settings. Normally I don't need to look up the meaning of any words as I read, but Maguire threw in more than a few surprises for me here with the vocabulary. This might put some readers off when it is combined with the formal language in which After Alice is written.

The quality of the writing is quite good, but the actual story is slow to unfold, and, for me, flipping back and forth between the two characters and settings wasn't quite as successful as it could have been. I ended up not really caring very much about what was going on with either character and kept reading simply to see how it would compare to the original and to see when Alice would show up.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Harper Collins for review purposes.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.