Book Review: The Looking Glass Wars, Book 1
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What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this isn't a quaint nonsense story
like its predecessor: There are violent battles, deaths, and
beheadings. The heroine's mother dies.
Families who read this book could compare it to the original. How does the author derive his story from Carroll's very different book? Do his interpretations seem reasonable? It might be fun to try to think up "true" stories behind other favorite tales.
Common Sense Media Review
A sea-change is happening in children's book publishing,
taking nearly a decade to come to its logical culmination in
this book. Written by a movie producer, plotted and paced like
a movie, and
promoted
like one too, THE LOOKING GLASS WARS is a book designed for one
thing -- to grab kids by the seat of the pants and keep them
excitedly turning the pages. It accomplishes its goal with
verve and imagination.
Alice in Wonderland purists shouldn't even open the book -- this isn't for them. Author Frank Beddor has said, "I guess I didn't realise how beloved Lewis Carroll's classic was. I was just seeking revenge. My grandmother and my mother made me read this book when I was 10 or 11, and I thought it was a terrible girls' book. This is my revenge; I wanted to rewrite it as a book boys would also enjoy."
The book's story is presented, not as a rewrite of that classic work, but as the awful truth that the fey Dodgson turned into a fairy tale, much to Alyss' horror and chagrin. Using snippets of the real Alice Liddell's biography, Beddor fashions an alternative history in which Alice is really Alyss, the escaped and hunted princess of Wonderland.
The Wonderland depicted here is both more horrific and more exciting than the surreal place Dodgson imagined. Filled with monsters, magic, and a mixture of technologies, it's at once more fantastic and more grounded in the reality of war and totalitarian repression than its predecessor.
Though The Looking Glass Wars is filled with topics for discussion (from literature to politics, history, and biography) and includes many parallels to events in today's world, this story is essentially fun -- well-written, well-constructed, lovingly thought-out and produced fun. It will do no harm at all to Carroll's classic -- which has always had more appeal to adults than children anyway -- and may interest a new generation of readers in the original.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
