This trip to Wonderland delivers a mature, lasting jolt.
This YA fantasy debut sees Alice return to Wonderland to thwart the Queen of Hearts’ madness.
The year is 1888, and 15-year-old Alice Liddell is in the Warneford Asylum in Oxford. She’s been placed in Dr. Longfellow’s psychiatric care since nearly drowning in a river and returning from the magical realm of Wonderland. At school, Headmistress Collins had grown tired of her “childish nonsense” regarding the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and others. Yet Alice continues to keep her memories alive in a notebook filled with sketches that she hides below the floorboards of her room. One day, she finds the halls of the asylum replaced by those of her home. She wanders through the familiar, empty place and outside to the river. “You’re late,” says the White Rabbit, or Sir Ralph of Longshoot (as he’s truly known). He informs Alice that the Queen of Hearts has gone “stark raving mad” and beheaded the king. Further, Alice must return to—and save—Wonderland. After waking from what might have been a dream, Alice receives a visit from her mother. She learns that her sister, Mary, is getting married, and everyone hopes she’ll be healthy enough to attend the wedding. Arrangements proceed for Swiss Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt to surgically cure Alice of her delusions once and for all. In this historically relevant fantasy, Ramsay honors Lewis Carroll’s work while expanding how readers connect with Wonderland. The humor lines up perfectly with the 19th-century source material, as when the Queen of Hearts asserts: “You must slouch. Everyone slouches in my presence.” Ramsay also offers excellent philosophical bons mots, including this White Rabbit gem: “You’re supposed to be wherever you belong.” An intriguing, though dark, surprise awaits in the character of Burckhardt, an actual pioneer of psychosurgery (for example, lobotomy) who began administering crude procedures in 1888. It’s bittersweet that in Wonderland, Alice meets the Prince of Hearts and his presence takes “away all the confusion and fear.” But she nevertheless comes to realize that “something was missing deep inside...that made Alice...Alice.” A harrowing finale closes this mostly playful narrative.
This trip to Wonderland delivers a mature, lasting jolt.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Red Rogue Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
