I approached Christina Henry's Alice with a default sense of dread and suspicion that I'd be writing a negative review. After all, Lewis Carroll's original Alice series of stories have been so ingrained into our culture that they've been regurgitated more than the meal fed by a mother bird to its babies. Wikipedia's article "Works based on Alice in Wonderland" lists a lot of parodies, homages, and unofficial sequels to the original story, and that doesn't even include the sub-articles like "Films and television programmes based on Alice in Wonderland." So I went into this book thinking, oh gee, here's another Alice in Wonderland parody that's riding the "Once Upon a Time" gravy train. What on Earth could this book offer than countless other authors haven't done already? Turns out quite a lot, actually. (Warning: this review may contain spoilers.)

Henry’s Alice is somewhere between a sequel and a re-imagining of the original story. It’s a sequel to the extent that it follows (thematically) from the original Lewis Carroll story with the aftermath of Alice’s adventures, but with the unfortunate twist that it finds her having been driven mad from the trauma of the experience, and we find her in an insane asylum many years later. It’s a re-imagining in that Henry takes the story well beyond the world of mathematical oddities and anthropomorphic animals and objects of Carroll’s books and Disney’s classic film.

Alice reinterprets the original tale as a mystical crime/horror story. We’re still in what’s ostensibly Victorian England, though Henry moves the story through the criminal underworld rather than a fantastic world under our own. The familiar strange animals of Wonderland are now thieves and brigands: the Caterpillar is an eccentric human trafficker; the Walrus and the Carpenter are leaders of street gangs; and the Mad Hatter, or “Hatcher” as Henry has renamed him, is a fellow inmate in the asylum who becomes Alice’s guide and protector as they re-enter the world. This is not to suggest that the story has been completely rendered “realistic.” Magic is still quite prevalent, as mystical elements thwart the characters throughout the story. It’s just that in Henry’s revisions, Wonderland apparently never existed, other than as a twisted metaphor for the dark realms where humans broker in money, power, and slavery.

Alice is the story of the titular character’s reawakening to what happened to her years earlier. Alice (the character) suffers from holes in her memory where she is troubled by visions of a faceless rabbit and unexplained events that she isn’t quite sure happened. A fire at the asylum gives her and her equally troubled cellmate neighbor, Hatcher, the opportunity to escape from London’s prison for the mentally ill, but Alice becomes convinced that some creature from her past has escaped with her. She and Hatcher embark on a quest to solve the holes in Alice’s memory, including confronting the Rabbit who ever lurks at the edge of her consciousness, but to do so, they need to work through the darkest parts of the Victorian underworld.

Without getting too spoileriffic, Henry takes the perhaps controversial decision to reimagine Alice as a rape survivor. While I haven’t parsed through ever Alice retelling listed on Wikipedia, I suspect that this take hasn’t been done before. I’m not aware of Henry wanting to write this story as a commentary on rape culture and its effects on victims. She nonetheless takes advantage of the idea to show the titular heroine moving through various effects of rape, from the abandonment of her friends and family (the asylum perhaps being a sad commentary on the poor mental health care of the 19th century) to confronting and triumphing over her tormentor. This is not some revenge fantasy, either, but a perspective on how a survivor can grow beyond a tragedy that risks dominating the victim forever.

Henry’s writing is impressive and gives an appropriate and believable voice to her characters, even making this story feel like a “period piece” despite all its strange magical elements. Her writing suffers from only two flaws. First, Henry leaves perhaps too much to the imagination in writing a setting. I was generally aware that the story took place in some fantastical Victorian England, but many of her specific settings were nondescript. Certainly we do not need the details of the square footage of each room a character is in, but some expansion of the story’s world would have helped. Second, although the grand and ever-present threat in this story is the Jabberwock, Henry’s writing makes that goal a little unfocused. The Jabberwock is the final threat, but Alice’s quest is consistently sidetracked by her encounters with other characters, particularly the Rabbit. These are all necessary to the story, but the final confrontation with the Jabberwock is very “tacked on” at the end. Really, by the time the Rabbit portion of the story finishes, readers won’t be able to help but notice that very little space is left to write about the end villain. The ending is good, but also a bit abrupt.

Otherwise, this was a fine story, and one worth reading for Lewis Carroll enthusiasts.

Rating: Four Cheshires out of Five.