The Wonderland Chronicles

Most of the Alice in Wonderland-related books generally fall into a very few categories. They are drenched in sexual excess, they are basically war stories or they fall somewhere else but the characters have no resemblance to the original characters.

This book avoids all of those problems. We start off with Pleasance, a girl who follows a white rabbit down a hole, landing in a Wonderland-like place that is divided into various kingdoms. There's a good White Queen and an evil Red Queen.

She meets characters from the original novel who are slightly different but no so much different that they could be anyone. She does meet a sword-bearing dormouse, someone not in the original story but found in one of the movies. She gets to meet the Dodo who calls her Princess. There are mushrooms that can change a person's size. There are also the playing card soldiers.

The Hatter is there as is a character called Uncle Bruno, obviously a reference to Lewis Carroll's stories about Slyvie and Bruno. The Lion and the Unicorn are in the story although the Lion is a vicious beast and tries to kill Pleasance. The jub-jub birds turn out to be large and nasty. There are snarks (also large and nasty) and the Tweedles who are rather funny at times.

The main theme is the Journey of Pleasance, Thistle (the dormouse warrior) and the Tweedles through a forest to reach the kingdom of the White Queen. There's a good bit of fighting that goes on here so this part becomes part of the Hero's Journey where the Hero has to fight his/her way through living (and sometimes nonliving) obstacles on their journey.

There are also other characters that appear, some from Through the Looking Glass and which also fit in well with this story.

I think the story is done very well. It's a harsher world than in the original story but it still works.

Main Index

Main Alice in Wonderland index page