ONCE UPON A WONDERLAND

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.