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After Alice: A Novel
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After Alice: A Novel
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After Alice: A Novel
Ebook299 pages5 hours

After Alice: A Novel

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

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About this ebook

From the multi-million-copy bestselling author of Wicked comes a magical new twist on Lewis Carroll’s beloved classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

When Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?

In After Alice, Gregory Maguire turns his dazzling imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings—and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend of Alice’s mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit her friend, but arrives a moment too late—and tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. If Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. Either way, everything that happens next is “After Alice.”

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 27, 2015
ISBN9780062410825
Author

Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked—the beloved classic that is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical of the same name and the major motion picture—Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. His series Another Day continues the story of Oz with The Brides of Maracoor, The Oracle of Maracoor, and The Witch of Maracoor, and his other novels include A Wild Winter Swan, Hiddensee, After Alice, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and Mirror Mirror. He lives in New England and France.

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Reviews for After Alice

Rating: 2.9141631175965665 out of 5 stars
3/5

233 ratings44 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Well, this one was a flop. It was just OK. I was going to give 3 stars, but then the ending, ugh. 2 stars it is.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Couldn’t get into this one.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dear me. I am so conflicted! See, on the one hand Gregory Maguire is one of my all time favorite writers. His ability to spin in his own particular brand of whimsy into classic tales is unrivaled. I've loved every single one of his books that I've set my hands on. Which is why I had such high hopes for this particular story. Alice in Wonderland is an iconic piece of childhood. Everyone knows it in some capacity or another. For me, it was the book I most loved to have read to me before bed. I've read every iteration of it that I could get. Needless to say, I was thrilled to read this.

    Now, I find myself finished and rather conflicted about After Alice. I'll start with the good. First off, Maguire does indeed pay homage to his source material. Readers can expect to see cameos from some of their favorite quirky characters, and Ada's interactions with them are just as delightful as her predecessors. Also, the whole feel of the original is still here. The erudite vocabulary, the nonsense that isn't quite nonsense, all of it is there in vivid color. The portions that take place in Wonderland are simply darling. Ada's stubborn ways, pitted against the inhabitants of this wonderful world, were just too much fun.

    What brings this book down, in my opinion, is its use of dual points of view. Lydia, Alice's older sister, has her own experiences chronicled in alternating chapters. Which means, of course, that every other chapter is filled with her Lydia's own musings and personality. Lydia isn't easy to like. She is, in fact, rather insufferable. Having her chapters mixed in with Ada's own whimsical ones made this book more difficult to read than I expected. I almost wanted to skip every other chapter, just to get back to Wonderland. If this book had focused solely on Ada's chapters, you would see a much different review being written. That part, I loved.

    So, final thoughts? This isn't Maguire's strongest book. While it definitely has a lot in it to love, I feel like long time readers of Maguire's works will probably fall into the same boat that I am in right now. Feeling torn between wanting to love this, and dreaming of what might have been. There is still much of the Maguire magic in this book! If you're a completionist, I'd still give this a spot on your TBR.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons." (pg. 70)I completely fell in love with this book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I had the feeling throughout the book that I was missing something important that would unlock the secrets and allow me see how clever the author was. I never found that missing element and finished the book not caring much if I found it or not. I've liked other work by the author and will continue to read him, but this book didn't grab me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Though written in the identical style of the original ( very difficult to follow at times, Gregory Maguire was able to get quite an interesting idea down on paper. I did enjoy it, but my middle schoolers would not get the dry wit or humor that goes with this book. I recommend for a senior in high school, or maybe a very enlightened Middle Schooler
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Maybe I should have given this one star. I never connected with any of the characters, or really cared what happened to them next. The familiar setting of the Alice stories probably made it worse; if the characters had explored a fresh landscape, at least then the scenery could have been surprising.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Like Maguire's other revisionist fantasy tales, this book surprisingly lacks whimsy, but the reader is compensated by though-provoking parallels.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Another VERY disappointing book from Gregory Maguire. I think Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is one of the best books in any genre and the Wicked books are also very good, but this and Mirror Mirror really disappointed me. It's not that I didn't like the original story on which they're based, since The Wizard of Oz doesn't interest me either... I just could NOT get interested in the main character at all.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Clever and beautiful prose with many laugh out loud lines. I appreciated the use of alliteration in particular.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Though written in the identical style of the original ( very difficult to follow at times, Gregory Maguire was able to get quite an interesting idea down on paper. I did enjoy it, but my middle schoolers would not get the dry wit or humor that goes with this book. I recommend for a senior in high school, or maybe a very enlightened Middle Schooler
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really wasn't sure I was going to finish this one, but I'm giving all the "eventually" books a shot, so I went with it and finally did it. It was hard to get into, and maybe slightly too connected to the source material. I never liked "Alice in Wonderland," but I also didn't like "The Wizard of Oz," but "Wicked" kind of fascinated me. This book was thoroughly disorienting, and I worried about Siam, but I was happy that Ada grew from her adventure.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It too me a dreadfully long time to get through this rather short book.One truth is that I’ve never been all that interested in Alice In Wonderland. The story, in any form, has never caught my fancy.Another truth is that the only non-tedious parts of After Alice did actually occur in Wonderland, but they were few and far between. Less than half of this book actually takes place in Wonderland, and even the parts that do are kind of a mess.You get a small peak at some notable Wonderland residents, but mostly this book is trying to get at something else. But what that is isn’t very clear, and mostly it talks itself in conceited circles.This rarely happens, but after I finished the last words and the cover I said to myself “Stupid.” Out-loud. To myself.I didn’t think it was possible for Maguire to write something more uninteresting than Lost. I guess I was wrong.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I really wanted this book to be good, but I just couldn't get into the story. I might just be biased since Alice in Wonderland is my favorite book, but I just feel like this was his least imaginative story. Kudos for all the references to the Jabberwocky though!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Stuff and nonsense with just a bit of clever wordplay.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story of Alice in Wonderland, seen through the eyes of the adults looking for her in the original world and Ada, Alice's friend, following her down the rabbit hole. The book is great. It is written in a similar style to Lewis Carroll, with funny anecdotes, play on words, and imaginative characters. The book will be better appreciated if Alice in Wonderland is read first, as Ada follows a similar adventure to Alice. It can be funny, cute, and occasionally exciting. Good story if you enjoy Lewis Carroll's original work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ada follows Alice down the hole and only catches up to her at the end. Siam finds his own way through the looking glass and decides he’s reached as good a place as he can get. This was never painful and had it’s own humor so I’m almost ready to forgive GM for the political tract of Wicked. But not really. I knew he could do better because of Stepsister.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A deeply fascinating extension of the Alice stories by Lewis Carroll with some underlying themes. Equal parts comedic and pathos delights the reader. An acquaintance with the Alice books, the poem the Jabberwock and Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream will enhance the reading experience.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gregory Maguire has made a name for himself by re-writing classic stories, providing a different perspective through the eyes of a secondary character. With After Alice, he re-tells the story of Alice in Wonderland, primarily through the perspective of a friend of Alice's who goes down to Wonderland after Alice. While she searches for Alice, her governess and Alice's family search for the girls, providing a connection to the "real world" and the pressing issues of the day. I am generally fascinated with Maguire's books, and this one fell a little flat for me. Rather than providing an alternative perspective on the original, it seemed to be more about telling a parallel story. While the parallel story was interesting, I missed feeling that I was getting a deeper look at a classic story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Lewis Carroll's Alice books are fun and clever and smart. 'After Alice' is occasionally the first, sometimes accidentally the second, and never as much the third as it thinks it is. This is a case of trying too hard that just ends up being rather uncomfortable to read. Maguire tries to give stories to too many characters and ends up shortchanging them all in the process. The conceit of following Ada when she follows Alice down the rabbit hole is interesting and could have been a wonderful story if Maguire had used the opportunity to view Wonderland through a different lens. Ada starts out as an unimaginative and fairly grounded child, but too quickly upon landing in Wonderland does she succumb to its surrealism. Having a logical child follow in Alice's footsteps and attempt to rationalize what she's seeing could have made for a thoughtful and even fun story. Even interspersing chapters of Lydia aboveground wondering where Alice has gotten off to and only half-assedly looking for her because she's too wrapped up in her own fifteen-year-old-girl problems could have added an intriguing texture to the story. Instead, it's like Maguire started with these ideas and then became enamored with his own cleverness and decided he needed to add in commentary on evolution and slavery in the American South and kept adding characters to do so and it all just ended up a muddled mess with all of the storylines just kind of fizzling out, rather than having proper endings.

    I wanted to love it, but ended up just being annoyed with it. This will not be joining my Alice collection. There are other pastiches that work better. They may not be "good", but they're entertaining (which this wasn't) and that counts for a lot.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm a huge fan of Gregory Maguire....Mirror Mirror being my favourite of his...but After Alice just didn't work for me. I found it mostly boring and even cheesy at times...like when Humpty Dumpty says that salt completes him. I imagine the author was trying to draw parallels between what lies beneath, whether our faith (and the debate of evolution) or our freedom (the underground railroad), our motivations. Unfortunately, it didn't work.I'm so glad this isn't my first Gregory Maguire book because I then might not of read his others, which are so much better.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Alice's friend Ada falls down the rabbit hole and tries to find Alice to get her back to Oxford, while Ada's nursemaid and Alice's sister do the same in the real world. Apart from some teenage angst, the Oxford part deals a some with the opinions on slavery and evolution in Victorian Britain which, had it been developed more, could have been properly interesting. As it stands now, it has nuggets of thoughts that make me want to read more on the subject. I do like Lydia as a character and she seems very real in her thought-patterns and actions; I would have preferred if the whole novel had been told from her point of view to be perfectly honest. The Wonderland parts are unfortunately rather poor reproductions of Carroll's stories - we meet some of the same characters, but they don't have the magic spark that the originals did. All in all, the novel is interesting for its potential, but not quite there for execution. And someone please get the thesaurus away from Mr. Maguire - he writes so many sentences that could have made sense in their simple forms, but which only serve to confuse.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    6 for 2016. I do like Gregory Maguire's books. I like the way he takes on classic stories and revises them to shift our focus. Of the ten books listed opposite the title page of this present volume, I own and have read eight. All that said, I continue to feel that Wicked is his masterpiece, and none of the books that followed have lived up to the promise made in that first retelling. After Alice, enjoyable as it is, also falls short, in my opinion. The title can be read in many ways, but perhaps the simplest explanation is that Ada, a neighbor child, falls through the rabbit hole and spends her time in "wonderland" chasing after Alice. Many of our favorite characters from the original Lewis Carroll story are present here--the white rabbit, the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse, the White Knight, the Duchess, and of course the Queen of Hearts and all her court. While the world that Ada encounters once she stops falling is every bit as strange as what we find in the original, it doesn't feel quite as surreal, at least to this reader. The introduction of young black child, the only member of a slave family to escape death, seems a bit far-fetched, and his only narrative purpose seems to be that he is the one who goes through the looking glass, eventually meeting up with Ada, but not returning with her and Alice. All in all, I recommend the book. It is an enjoyable read, although I found the opening pages a bit tedious as if Maguire were trying to force the reader into 1860s England through the power of language. I give it four stars out of five because I just wish it were as lyrical as Wicked.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow! This was not what I expected. Not necessarily a compelling, "can't wait to get back to it" kind of plot, but descriptive and oddly thoughtful and replete with passages like this:

    The bells said that at its core, human life was fundamentally a sort of organic clockwork, while the winds and skylarks that swept against the sound of metronomic iron timekeeping argued for variety, subtlety, epiphany. What the sun thought, or meant, or said, was too high overhead to be heard. Like the vast deity to which Lydia's father tried to pray, the sun shouted its light and simultaneously kept its magnificent silence.

    Wow!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Summary: This is the story of Ada, Alice's sometimes friend, who sees Alice disappear down the rabbit hole, and follows her into Wonderland. Ada is not a child of much imagination, and her adventures are not quite the same as what Alice finds. Furthermore, the world she leaves behind on that idyllic Oxford day - Alice's sister, Ada's own nanny, her colicky infant brother, the strange Mr. Darwin that is visiting Alice's father, etc. has its own turmoil.Review: I struggled with this one a lot, and ultimately wound up not finishing it. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't get into it. I have to be in a particular mood for Maguire's writing, I think, and I just wasn't - the prose felt overworked and intentionally Quirky(!) rather than natural and unique, and it didn't flow for me at all. I also had a really hard time getting into the story - whether it's the writing that kept me at arm's length, or that the characterizations (particularly of Ada) didn't feel fully realized, I can't entirely say. I did enjoy picking up the connections to Alice in Wonderland, when they came past, but the balance of references to more straight-forward repetition felt off (For example, Ada's encounter with the "Drink Me" vial felt only superficially different from Alice's, and lasted way too long, in my opinion.) But on the whole I wasn't invested in the story, didn't care about the characters, and the off-beat-ness of Maguire's prose combined with the bizarre nature of Wonderland (which should have been a natural fit, right?) just made the whole thing really challenging to read, easy to put down, and a struggle to pick back up. Even the appearance of Charles Darwin couldn't keep me interested, so I decided after about 100 pages (the end of Part 1) that it was time to bow out. 2 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: I know other people get along with Maguire's style a lot better than I do, so they will hopefully have better luck with this one than I did.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    After Alice was one of those books that had a lot of promise but just didn't quite deliver. I felt so on the fence about this book that I actually did something out of the ordinary...I read other people's reviews. The donsensus of those reviews was that there were a lot of storylines that were begun and then didn't really go anywhere. I have to agree. The premise was basically a look at the world that Lewis Carroll created in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but from another perspective. The journey through Ada's eyes, however, was basically a rehashing of the original tale. We got tantalizing glimpses into the character of Ada (briefly mentioned as a school friend of Alice) who is stigmatized because of a disability but it never really goes anywhere. The story isn't just focused on her though. In the world of 1800s England, Lydia who is Alice's older sister is having her own difficulties. And then Charles Darwin shows up with a young man and the runaway slave that he's harboring. Did I mention that there are a lot of storylines that are not fully developed? I have to echo the wish of one reviewer that lamented that the issue of gender inequality and the culture of the time period wasn't a bigger theme. (That's a book I'd like to read so if you have any recommendations please comment below!) I'm really unsure of my lasting impression other than I wouldn't buy it and I'm not much inclined to reading anything else by this author. :-/
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I wanted to love this book, and there were certainly passages that lived up to both Carroll and Maguire, but all in all, it fell short of my expectations.The word play was fantastic. The characterization superb. The plot, however, was too jilted and chaotic for me. Yes, I understand this was Wonderland, but rather than the dream land of Carroll, this is presented as an alternate reality. I can accept that the Cheshire Cat and the Queen are looney, but this was all over the place for me.I will add the caveat that this took me a very long time to get through, and going a few days between reading a few pages may have created this chaos on my own.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    His language is exquisite. And the children were worth caring about.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I really wanted to get into this one and love it, sadly that was not the same. Maguire, who so wonderfully recreates classic tales, completely lost me in this one. After Alice is about a girl named Ada who ends up falling into Wonderland after Alice does and searches for her to bring her home.What I expected from this tale was a play on the Alice story and I did get that but it was interspersed with crazy vocabulary and that made it hard to read through the actual details of the places and characters. We also get this crazy back and forth - in some chapters we follow Ada in Wonderland, while in others we are back in England witnessing the aftermath of two young girls going missing. People care but really don't and there is Darwin, yes THE Darwin and it reads like a social commentary of the time period, only it focuses on two girls that may or may not be missing. It was all very strange and so not what I was hoping for in this book.I gave this one 2 stars, which means it was Ok, because it was just ok. The Ada adventures were somewhat interesting and the other characters were at least a little entertaining - although I didn't really want to read about them in the ending of the book. Curiouser and curiouser....that is how I felt about this one.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Gregory Maguire's latest twist on classic literature comes in After Alice, the story of Alice in Wonderland from an entirely different point of view. In this book, Alice barely makes an appearance. Instead we get to see what happened up in Oxford during Alice's trip to Wonderland as well as a new perspective on Wonderland as Alice's minor friend Ada accidentally tumbles down the rabbit hole and spends her time trying to catch up with Alice.Ada is a neighbor who lives down the lane from Alice and has been sent to take some marmalade to Alice's family and potentially spend time with Alice. Due to some physical limitations, Ada wears a back/body/leg brace to help her move about and she has been entrusted to a governess. In a bout of impatience and (seemingly) uncharacteristic impetuosity, Ada gets far ahead of her governess and ends up tumbling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Ada's governess, Miss Armstrong, frantically searches for Ada and meets up with Alice's teenage sister Lydia. Miss Armstrong and Lydia spend the day searching Oxford (both alone and occasionally paired up) for Ada and Alice...more on them in a moment.As Ada is introduced and even more once she arrives in Wonderland, it is clear that where Alice is imagination and curiosity personified, Ada is Alice's grounded realist foil. Where Alice had stars in her eyes and her head in the clouds, Ada was more of a naturalist, taking the world at face value and seeking for understanding while straining to grow her youthful desire for playfulness. Ada seems to have a knowledge and a perceptiveness beyond her young years but is still a bit oblivious to the nature of the world around her. Her trip to Wonderland is suited to be a great opportunity for her to open her eyes to new possibilities...to increase her own imagination and cultivate a sense of curiosity and wonder. Initially she is sure she is falling into Hell, based partly on her recent glances at Dante's Inferno. This notion seems to stick in the back of her mind as we catch subtle references later on. As she progresses through Wonderland, meeting various inhabitants and experiencing some of its craziness she remains focused squarely on finding Alice. As such, her plentiful opportunities for imaginative growth seem to fall flat. And yet, she does have some insights into herself and her surroundings which have an impact on her and give some growth to her character. I was excited to see a wide variety of characters and experiences from Wonderland that strayed beyond the simple and most popular/famous elements known by casual readers. These were fun additions and made me want to re-read the original Alice books. Still, I was left a bit disappointed with the presentation of some of these characters. It felt like they were trying too hard to straddle the fence between their original self and the message that Maguire was trying to present and as a result they tripped and fell over that fence they were straddling. Meanwhile, back up in Oxford we have an entirely different sort of story going on. Miss Armstrong is fretting as she wildly roams the houses and lanes trying to find Ada. Lydia is a sulky and sassy teenager who is pressed into service to find Alice, help Miss Armstrong find Ada as well as to help entertain or accompany some guests that are at her home for the day for a visit with her father. The prominent visitor is the famed Charles Darwin, now bitterly aged and thus accompanied by a younger (early 20s?) American, Mr. Winter who is also toting along his own ward, a young African boy named Siam who Mr. Winter recently helped escape the bonds of slavery. Maguire uses the plotline in Oxford to explore a variety of themes. Lydia is caught squarely in a "coming of age" scenario while also dealing with the recent death of her mother. She's a teenage girl in England struggling to mourn for her mother and figure out her womanly place in the future without any remaining role model. When Mr. Winter arrives on the scene we find her thrown into teenage swoons of romanticism. At the same time, we catch snippets of discussions on the arguments between religion and evolution based on the conversations between Darwin and Lydia's father. We also get commentary on slavery, the slave trade and concepts of racism. Maguire truly spreads his net wide and as a result I felt like the concepts were a bit muddled and I was left unsure as to the message being presented. The juxtaposition of the Wonderland and Oxford stories was fun and interesting but they quickly became imbalanced. I found myself much more interested and intrigued by the world of Oxford than the fantastical world of Wonderland. The imaginative Wonderland had fun and whimsy but it felt forced and in the end fell flat. Unfortunately even though the world of Oxford was vibrant and more fully fleshed out, it was overwhelmed with too many themes fighting for attention and never fully satisfied either. Overall I was really excited for this idea. I really enjoyed the original Alice stories and I was genuinely interested to see a compelling tale from an alternate point of view. Sadly, I felt like the Wonderland scenes suffered from too little development and the Oxford scenes suffered from too much. Maguire's language and writing style is rich and full and in some ways reminiscent of Carroll's style in the original Alice but his heightened vocabulary and some of the humor ended up a bit too stilted for Wonderland and the imbalance was unsettling. I finished the book with a thoughtfulness that I appreciated but also with a hollow, incomplete feeling. Perhaps if I had a more recent reading of the original Alice tales I might have greater appreciation for Maguire's treatment of the Wonderland sequences but I'm unsure how much (or if) that would help. In the end, I wanted more from the book than it was able to deliver.***2.5 out of 5 stars