After Alice by Gregory Maguire, the bestselling author of WICKED, is a wonderful retelling of what happened next after Alice disappeared down the rabbit hole. An entertaining spin on Lewis Caroll’s classic tale of Alice in Wonderland, this novel will delight fans of Angela Carter.
When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?
Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings -and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice but, arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.
Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.
Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice.
When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?
Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings -and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice but, arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.
Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.
Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice.
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Reviews
Alice doesn't live here anymore-and Maguire has great fun upending the furniture to find out where she's 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... A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children's classic, retrofitted for grown-ups-and a lot of fun
Thoughtful and disconcertingly memorable... This is a feast for the mind, and readers will ruminate on it long after turning the last page
Maguire effortlessly leaps between the absurd illusions of Wonderland and the building suspense of the search for the children in antique Oxford... [He] 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... [A] harvest of delightfully stated observations, [confronting] weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language. [Maguire's] playful vocabulary may be Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python, with a fine, unforced sense of play... his erudition is a joy, his sense of fun infectious
Maguire conjures up a vision of Victorian England that ranges across its stuffiness, its snobbery and its cruelties