Review by New York Times Review
IMAGINE FINDING YOURSELF in a place where delusion is enforced by custom and law, no one really understands what anyone else is saying, facts are suspect, lies relished, heads roll for arbitrary and fanciful reasons, and only children are perceptive enough to observe that nothing makes sense. Where might you be? Wonderland? A Ted Cruz rally? In "After Alice," Gregory Maguire suggests Lewis Carroll's Oxford might well match that description. During the reign of Victoria, this ancient college town of peculiar men and unexamined double standards was every bit as confounding as the world little Alice discovered at the bottom of the rabbit hole. The one is contrasted against the other in a narrative that purrs with all the warm confidence of a Cheshire cat. Ada Boyce is puffy, bent-backed and unlovely, confined to an agonizing iron corset meant to correct her unladylike posture. Mother drinks, father sermonizes, baby shrieks and the governess entertains daydreams of drowning her charge. Ada's closest (and only) companion is dreamy Alice Clowd, who lives at the Croft, a short walk along the River Cherwell from Ada's home. On a dazzling midsummer morning in 1860-something, Ada slips away from her adult guardians to hunt down her best friend, plants a foot wrong and goes for a long tumble into literature's most famous fantasia, the nonsense world Carroll introduced in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." At first, hardly anyone notes the disappearance of two children (it was an era when parents worried less about the sort of creepy fellows who fixate on little girls - creepy fellows like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, who history suggests might not have been an ideal babysitter). Ada's family has no great use for her. Alice's big sister, Lydia, is glad not to have a couple of brats underfoot. And Alice's father has only just emerged from mourning his prematurely deceased wife to play host to a visiting celebrity, Charles Darwin. Mr. Darwin has brought a fetching young American abolitionist along with him, Mr. Winter, who is himself accompanied by a child escaped from slavery: quiet, serious Siam. Winter may be handsome, idealistic and eligible, but he's also too old for Lydia Clowd, who is just 15. That doesn't stop Lydia from luring him on a long walk that will give her a chance to experiment with grown-up flirtation (in this novel, everyone is a victim of impossible daydreams). But romantic preoccupations give way to growing alarm, after little Siam goes missing as well, falling through the looking glass while no one is paying attention. Suddenly the somnolent summer afternoon has devoured three children whole, and only Lydia and Ada's governess have any sense that all is not entirely right. Maguire effortlessly leaps between the absurd illusions of Wonderland and the building suspense of the search for the children in antique Oxford. Down below, Ada and Siam grapple with the maddening nonsense of the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter. Up above, Lydia finds herself no less befuddled by her own mysterious longings and the motives of the adults around her. She's also haunted by a darker and more serious disappearance than the absence of a few wandering children: the heart-sickening loss of her mother. Her faith is of no use to her. Darwin's theories of evolution have made the comforts of religion look as silly as a story out of Mother Goose. Nor can Lydia turn to that seat of 19th-century authority, her father, for wisdom. Mr. Clowd has long since vanished down the rabbit hole of his own grief and confusion. The territory of mourning is unmapped country; so too is the geography of courtship, desire and cultural expectation. "Lydia will spend her entire life in a nexus of Victorian social understandings too near to be identified by the naked eye, like viruses, or radiation," Maguire notes, in typically elegant fashion. "After Alice" offers an almost embarrassing harvest of delightfully stated observations like that one. Lydia may be stranded in an adult world of unreasonable and ridiculous obligations, but in Wonderland, Ada has slipped free of both her insufferable corset and the equally iron-shod confines of her time, place and status. Siam finds the neighborhood even more to his liking. As a slave, Siam was once offered his freedom, if he could scoop up a hundred pennies that had been baked white-hot in a campfire. His palms are still horribly marked by the burns. But his blackness and his scars don't bother anyone in Wonderland, a place beyond the reach of history's brutality. "There is no back story in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs." For an orphaned black kid in the era of the Civil War, that place on the other side of the looking glass looks a lot like real freedom. AS ADA AND SIAM draw nearer to Alice, the continually off-screen object of their quest, and as time runs out to find the vanished children in the world above, Maguire closes in on some big, haunting ideas himself, about the loss of loved ones and religious faith, about cultural and romantic subjugations, and about the evolutionary value of imagination. Heady stuff. Maguire confronts his weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language. A sample page offers us such word candy as "bosh" and "gallootress," and when stout Ada spies her own reflection, she feels she is staring upon "a rotten packet of fairy." Maguire's playful vocabulary may be Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python: "'I may be drowning,' she called. "'Please don't,' came a reply." The author's mastery of his material occasionally falters, in small ways. He renders the social and historical tensions of long-ago Oxford so well, in such compelling fashion, that Wonderland itself occasionally loses its luster. And each reader will have a different tolerance for characters who speak in riddles. For myself, I'll take a monstrous Jabberwocky over circular and meaningless jibber-jabber any day. Still, it seems wrong to quibble when presented with such a tasty froth of incident and such a fine, unforced sense of play. Gregory Maguire has made a cottage industry out of reframing famous children's stories to explore neglected side characters and misrepresented villains. He has tracked through all of the precincts of Oz and a lot of the landscape of Grimm's fairy tales, and one would not be surprised if his heart was no longer in such expeditions. Furthermore, Alice's Wonderland has been so often revisited - in novels, films, games and comics - that it would seem everything worth discovering there must have been strip-mined long ago. Even that phrase, "down the rabbit hole," is so overused that it now has all the life of a taxidermied white hare. But Maguire's enthusiasm is intact, his erudition a joy, and his sense of fun infectious. What could have been a tired exercise in the familiar instead recharges a beloved bit of nonsense. By book's end, most readers will be hoping for a sequel (Maguire leaves the door open to one). As we say in Maine, my old home state: wicked. Maguire explores cultural and romantic subjugation, and the value of imagination. JOE HILL is the author of a story collection, "20 th Century Ghosts,'' and three novels, most recently "NOS4A2
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Alice first visited Wonderland over a century ago, Lewis Carroll introduced young readers to a world of imaginative characters and places such as had never been seen before. Now Maguire takes us on the journey again, this time in the company of Ada, who has fallen down the legendary rabbit hole after her friend. While Ada goes in search of Alice, always a few steps behind in the same vibrantly colorful land, Alice's sister, Lydia, remains in the ordinary world of Victorian England, searching the streets of Oxford for the missing girls, while her father visits with Charles Darwin to discuss the future of faith. Ada's adventure underground gives readers a new perspective on the oddities to be found there, but it's the search through Oxford that really turns this story on its head. Through Lydia and other new characters, Maguire firmly sets Wonderland in time and place and weaves an intricate web of symbolism and allegory, asking readers to consider issues of humanity that are as timeless as the original tale itself. The novel is full of the magic, wonder, and fresh twists that his fans have come to expect, and Maguire- and Wonderland-lovers alike will enjoy this fantastic return.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Maguire (Wicked) turns his attention to Lewis Carroll's Victorian fantasies, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in this thoughtful and disconcertingly memorable novel. Ada Boyce, Alice's best friend, also falls down a rabbit hole into a phantasmagorical realm where she too is tossed and bossed about by strange creatures who delight in clever, frustrating wordplay. She longs to shed the metal brace that both imprisons and protects her crooked back, but she also wants to reunite with Alice and go home. Meanwhile, Alice's older sister, Lydia, disturbed by the death of their mother and her own impending womanhood, searches distractedly for a visiting little boy, Siam, who has climbed into the world on the other side of the mirror in the family drawing room. Maguire frequently pulls back from the action to offer a larger perspective as characters struggle to discover who and what they are-and, most importantly, why they are. This is a feast for the mind, and readers will ruminate on it long after turning the last page. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What happened above after Alice fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland? That is the question Maguire (Wicked) answers in his latest novel. In alternating chapters we follow Alice's sister Lydia, who was watching Alice but lost her, and Ada Boyce, Alice's neighbor and friend, who also falls into Wonderland. Lydia is beset-by Miss Armstrong, Ada's governess; by her father's entertaining Charles Darwin that day; with being a newly motherless 15-year-old girl. Ada, free of adult scrutiny and her scoliosis brace for the first time, experiences the oddness of Wonderland as she follows in Alice's wake. In one vexing day, Ada, Lydia, and Miss Armstrong must adapt to deal with their circumstances and find new facets of themselves. VERDICT Maguire fans should be pleased with his take, at turns clever and philosophical, on the Lewis Carroll classic. Other readers may find the slow build up of action and wrenching jumps between the two disconnected settings, one in stilting 19th-century language and the other in the nonsense of Wonderland, a bit too high a barrier to keep them reading. [See Prepub Alert, 4/6/15; see also Barbara -Hoffert's "Why Alice Still Matters: Celebrating 150 Years of Wonderland with Gregory -Maguire," LJ 8/15.-Ed.]-Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
The story of Lewis Carroll's Alice is turned upside down as Ada, a neighbor and friend, also falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Afterwards, life progresses for those aboveground, some of whom start looking for both girls. Maguire creatively adapts the classic tale, mixing whimsy with science as he finds a way to work in Charles Darwin and his research on natural selection and an American abolitionist into the narrative. Teenagers will feel comfortable reading about well-known characters such as the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts. This sense of familiarity, along with the brisk pace of the novel, will help readers through the often challenging vocabulary. They may also enjoy references to literary works from Dante and Shakespeare to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. As in the source material, there is great language play and there is no shortage of clever riddles. The secondary characters are just as fun, and teens may identify with Lydia, the older sister who is happy to be rid of Alice for the day while mourning the loss of her mother. With an open ending, this could easily become another popular series opener like Wicked (HarperCollins, 1995). VERDICT Teens who enjoy reimagined tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or any of Maguire's previous works will line up to read his newest creation.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Alice doesn't live here anymoreand Maguire (Egg Spoon, 2014, etc.) has great fun upending the furniture to find out where's she gone. Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice has dropped down the rabbit hole"again," sighs an exasperated governess, one of the story's many btes noiresand now her best friend and confidante, Ada Boyce, is falling in after her, looking to bring our young Persephone, or perhaps Eurydice, back into the light. Well, of course, Ada finds all sorts of curiouser and curiouser things down below, from hookah-smoking caterpillars to mad hatters and pince-nez-sporting sheep, with Carroll's original cast of characters plus a few of Maguire's own imagining. Up on Earth, Maguire populates the scene with all kinds of folks from real life, among them Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, and various members of the British royal family, who fuss about doing serious and real-world thingsincluding, in a nice, smart closing turn, a meditation on the evolutionary qualities of, yes, the imagination. Not that Alice and Ada aren't (weren't, that is) real, but Maguire leaves it to them, mostly, to enjoy the wackiness of the underworld and for the grown-ups to do the pondering. Still, some of the slyest moments come when the two worlds collide: "I have always heard that Queen Victoria was moderate in her tastes," says Ada, confused at a subterranean knight's alarm that the queen is likely to have their heads. And there's no end to sinister possibilities along with the usual charming Alice storylineafter all, Lewis Carroll didn't inscribe the entrance to Wonderland's tiny door with the words out of Dante, "All ye who enter here, abandon hope." A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children's classic, retrofitted for grown-upsand a lot of fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
