An inessential but imaginative sequel to the children’s classic.
An adult Alice returns to Wonderland in Stoneham’s fantasy novel, the second in a series.
Alice has grown up, though she still lives at home with no marriage prospects in sight. Whether her arrested development has anything to do with her three visits to Wonderland—including the most recent, during which she fell in love with Jack Door, a feathered boy with a penchant for door maintenance—is a matter of debate. While on a family holiday in Brighton, Alice is caught in an undertow and carried off by a wave filled with strange objects: “In fact, the more Alice looked, the more peculiar objects she identified; a porpoise, a picnic basket, a turtle (she checked the head to see if it was genuine or just a mock turtle), a parasol and what looked like a whole nursery of baby clams.” Alice soon finds herself on a beach, arguing with a surly genderfluid mermaid—the Little Mermaid, in fact. Realizing she’s back in Wonderland, Alice sets off to find Jack, navigating the psychodramas of a host of fairy-tale characters along the way, including an arsonist escaped from a mental asylum who hates being called Cinderella; a narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty desperate to bring a murderous cook to justice; and Rumpelstiltskin, a poltergeist working to clear his tarnished name. It turns out the old fairy tales were much stranger than Alice ever knew—and in Wonderland, they become stranger still. Stoneham’s interpretation of Wonderland replicates some of Carroll’s surrealism and linguistic playfulness, but the book generally reads like a slightly stylized piece of contemporary fiction, as in this passage in which Alice meets the mermaid: “Alice was curious to know what gender the mermaid was in human form but, as any product of the Victorian Age, she didn’t relish the thought of a conversation about genitalia.” The fairy-tale material is slightly stale, in part because the stories have already been deconstructed so many times. The weirder bits, though—like the avian Jack Door, and the half-rat, half-toad Mawk—are worthy of the original.
An inessential but imaginative sequel to the children’s classic.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9789526506425
Page Count: 359
Publisher: National Library of Finland
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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