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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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