The Wonderland trials

A reimagining of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a near-future England, a Great Divide happened when twin princesses vied for the throne, and now Normal England and Wonderland exist uneasily side by side, occupying the same space but not the same reality. Sixteen-year-old Alice Liddell is an orphan, a card shark, and a sometime pickpocket. She dreams of trading her Normal life, in which she lives with boring older sister Charlotte, for the glory of the Wonderland Trials, an annual competition between four teams of teenagers. The Trials require competitors to solve puzzles and involve magic and trickery; physical injury is a very real threat. When Alice is chosen as a Wildflower (someone from the non-Wonder side of things who is recruited into Wonderland for the Trials), she finds her background and future are entirely different from what she believed. Heavy-handed exposition fails to make sense of a world that plays with the idea of nonsense but lacks the effervescent whimsy Carroll embraced. Characters (almost exclusively default White) fall into thinly developed types, especially love interest and snarky bad boy Chess Shire. British terms (brolly, git, mate) awkwardly pepper the largely American English syntax, further detracting from this muddled work that does not live up to its inventive premise. Like the Jabberwock, best avoided. (map) (Speculative fiction. 12-16) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.