Alice In Wonderland x From London to Brighton x Shutter Island x The Alcemhyst

3.5 stars

A dystopian novel inspired by the wonderful work of Lewis Carroll… Be mindful of your rigger warnings since this book talks about rape, kidnapping, kid trafficking.

It was fine, definitely not amazing, but fine. I was interested, as I always am, in the promise of a "dark" and "psychotic" (kind of a shallow adjective but thats fine) reimagining of Lewis Carrol's Alice, and was disappointed in this iteration -- which is fine, I'm pretty particular. Again, this novella was finishable, and there were some pretty compelling concepts, but I finished the book with gratitude that it was over.

Some more specific opinions:

First of all, I found the prose dry and boring, which is just a taste thing. I haven't read any of Christina Henry's other works, and have no plan to, but at this point in her writing she seems to have neglected lessons on "show-not-tell." There are just large blocks of description, but not the flowery, overly decadent kind, the literal, omnipotent, and dry kind. I would not call this writing style cinematic in any way, and found myself just collecting information as I read rather than envisioning the scene in front of me. Style is all a matter of taste, but I found the storytelling boring and there were only a few lines that struck me as interesting.

The characters felt flat, similar to the prose. Maybe the prose influenced how I felt about the characterization, but all the same I only ended up caring about Nell, Harry, and Pipkin, two random tavern keepers and a giant white rabbit. Alice, our main character and heroine, is infantile and written in a way that feels devoid of empathy for a troubled mind. I don't make any claims about the authors personal experience, but Alice felt like a cheap imitation of a victim. All of these characters felt like puppets, not actual people, which is really frustrating and borderline nauseating when there is so much rape and violence being inflicted upon them. Speaking of, the most "adult" part of this novel is the over emphasis of, as I said, rape and gore. Sometimes it feels interesting, even important, for us the audience to be reminded of it and to see it on full display, and most of the other times it is just tastelessly thrown in our face. If fantasy or horror is to be used as a tool to explore the darkness of our reality, then I expect it to be impactful, effective, used when it has to be. I felt overwhelmed, disturbed, annoyed by it and I am not averse to these themes or showing them explicitly and descriptively, but again, it just felt really hallow. There to shock you, there to remind you that this world is bad and we need to remember how bad it is. Don't worry, in case you forgot, you need to be told explicitly, bluntly, with the words just as they are, that this place is bad. You do not need to form the opinion on your own, the book will tell you.

There were certainly interesting concepts used here, the Butterflies of the Caterpillar, the Rose Way, even the overtone of communal neglect and power struggle between official military and organized crime -- but all of this shoved into a novella that spent more prose space reiterating the same details over and over rather than coming up with new and interesting ways to display the truths we are exposing, it all just... didn't really matter to me. I ended the novel not caring about anyone. This story was interesting and will be interesting to someone else, but I walked away unimpressed but grateful that Henry shared her thoughts with us... even if I thought they were tasteless at times. I hope her language has richened and her novels going forward have a bit more flavor and character.

Pipkin supremacy

This had some pretty dark moments but a great twist on a classic

I just didn't care for this book at all, although since I stuck with it to the end, I guess 2 stars is an appropriate enough rating. Violent and gory, but no real character development. And since I'm not a big Alice in Wonderland fan, there wasn't much fun for me in seeing how the classic Alice characters are reimagined here. It's a cruel, dark tale, and wasn't enjoyable for me. Which is a bummer, because I bought this book plus its sequel at the same time, and now I'm not interested in reading the second one.

Wer die Geschichte von Alice im Wunderland kennt und sich auch mal die Frage gestellt hat, wie es wäre wenn es doch nicht so blumig wäre wie es scheint. Eine schaurige, teils verstörende Handlung die bestimmt nichts für schwache Nerven ist. Die dunkle Seite einer Geschichte die jeder kennt, die dir durchaus den Schlaf rauben kann.