Booking It: The Looking Glass Wars

Alice in Wonderland has been done a thousand different ways. From the original fantastical children’s book to Disney’s version to Tim Burton’s strange 2010 movie, we have a rich selection of Wonderlands to explore, all of them colorful, topsy-turvy lands in their own way. Something about the freedom of Wonderland’s insanity sparks the imagination and reawakens the curious child in all of us, dreaming of madmen and grinning cats and growing to the size of skyscrapers. One of my favorite versions of Wonderland, however, comes from an author who decided to take an entirely different route from the norm.

The Wonderland of Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars is not a delightfully mad, colorful world where logic has no place and one can rely on sudden growth spurts to prevent beheadings. Rather, it is a deadly serious fantasy queendom caught in a civil war. Noble families play for political power, card soldiers are mechanical, robotic beings and chess pieces are hardened generals. Enter into this Alyss Heart, the daughter of benevolent Queen Genevieve and a young girl with a powerful imagination – a force to be reckoned with in Wonderland, since imagining things here can make them come into existence. She is precocious and rather spoiled, and the heir to the throne if she manages to survive that long. Queen Genevieve’s older sister and Alyss’s aunt is the notorious Redd, an exceptionally cruel and dictatorial ruler who believes she was robbed of the throne and so is determined to take it back.

Redd’s coup d’état sends Alyss fleeing for safety, and she winds up falling through the Pool of Tears right into our world, in Victorian London. She remains stuck here for years, unable to return home or help free her kingdom from Redd. Although she is eventually adopted by the Liddell family, she remains miserable for a long time, teased by other children and lectured by adults for telling the story of her childhood. Only a reverend named Charles Dodgson seems willing to listen, and even he proves a false friend, publishing a ludicrously fanciful version of “Alice’s” tale under the name of Lewis Carroll. Meanwhile, one other Wonderlander is present in our world, and searching desperately for Alyss: Hatter Madigan.

Hatter Madigan is easily my favorite part of Beddor’s Wonderland. This version of the Mad Hatter is a mysterious but intensely loyal and expertly trained bodyguard, whose “hat” can turn into a deadly weapon at any moment. Hatter’s character captures a great deal of what I enjoy about Beddor’s novel. One core element, the hat, is practically all the similarity that Hatter Madigan shares with Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, but that is enough to pay tribute to the original while giving Beddor the freedom to invent a delightfully original character.

The Looking Glass Wars is not, nor is it intended to be, a version of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Rather, Beddor takes a world that has delighted people for years and picks out nuggets of ideas, almost as if he were reading Carroll’s notes rather than the finished work. From those nuggets, he builds a story that is entirely his own. It is a story for anyone who is fascinated by the idea of card soldiers or wise caterpillars but has either already exhausted their interest in the original and its more faithful adaptations, or possibly just wants a more coherent plot. The meta moment of inserting Carroll’s work into his own novel as the twisted version of events is a playful piece of writing, offering some tongue-in-cheek jokes for his readers.

This is hardly a challenging read, but it makes for an excellent fantastical page-turner. And that is, in my opinion, for the best. After all, the original work is so wildly topsy-turvy and difficult to follow down any coherent train of logic that while it certainly can be and has been interpreted to have any number of deeper meanings, those are often difficult to swallow. To enjoy Wonderland is to embrace the places that imagination can take us, to embrace a bit of madness and suspend our disbelief so that we can live for a little while in a different world. If Beddor’s Wonderland were some deep, literary work, it would lose a part of its heart. As serious as the story is for its characters, for us, it is an exciting, creative world full of magic and thrilling battles that we can sit back and delight in, just as we can delight in the dreamy romp of Carroll’s novel.