Book info

• Title Alice in Wonderland
• Author Lewis Carroll
• Year 1865
• Genre Childrens

When Alice sees a white rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat pocket she decides to follow it, and a sequence of most unusual events is set in motion.

Thoughts

I’ve read this before, of course, a few times. Not for a while, though, and that left me finding some sections a surprise. I’d forgotten some of the more exciting incidents, and yet other bits were a lot smaller than I remembered. The Cheshire Cat, for instance, is in it a lot less than I thought, whilst I’d forgotten the White Rabbit came back at the end.

There’s plenty of whimsy to love in the book, but equally, some of the confusion can be quite frustration. There can be page after page of nonsense, confusion, rhyming and contradictory conversation, people always talking in circles. While there is similarities to the whimsical nature of Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s all quite less warm and cuddly. Alice gets so frustrated with the characters, the creatures answer back to her, and you feel her stubborn nature stamping her foot all the time. She’s more than capable of giving as good as she gets.

I can’t work out whether I like this or not. The imagination is incredible, the ideas it conjures up are fabulous, but it’s tempered by the angst and the hurry to get on out of there.

Rating: 3 / 5