Fairy tale retellings have become a mainstay in the modern
world of literature. You get to take an established universe and work in a new
story from someone’s perspective that you haven’t seen before and, as an avid
writer of fanfiction, it’s a section of fiction that I’m fond of. Most of it
ends up being something dark and gritty and The
Looking Glass Wars fits in that category to a tee.
When Alyss Heart, heir to the Wonderland throne, must flee Wonderland
to escape her murderous aunt Redd, she finds herself lost and alone in
Victorian London. Her identity is stripped from her and she becomes a normal
girl of the time period while Redd is left unopposed to rule with an iron fist.
Fortunately, Alyss is gone, but not forgotten. Her Royal Bodyguard Hatter
Madigan goes searching through every corner of our world to find the lost
princess and return her to Wonderland so she may eventually battle Redd for her
rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.
And so goes the tale of The
Looking Glass Wars. A tale that pushes aside Disney’s notion of a curious
little blonde girl and leads us on a journey of epic portions in the war for
Imagination! The author of this ambitious reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s
fantastic tale is Frank Beddor. In addition to being an author he’s also a
champion freestyle skier, a film producer, a stuntman, actor, and CEO of
Automatic Pictures Production Co. His best
known works are There’s Something About
Mary and Wicked as a producer,
and writing the retelling of Alice in
Wonderland with The Looking Glass
Wars series.
Wonderland, in this retelling, is a vast kingdom that’s sort
of a mirrored version of the Earth we know and love. If our world is one of
science, theirs is one of magic (aka imagination in this story). There’s huge
deserts and unimaginably complex cities. To travel quickly about Wonderland one
takes a mirror expressway; and to travel to our world one can jump into the
pool of tears and wind up somewhere on Earth by means of a puddle. After Redd
takes over, Wonderland becomes a sinister place with arenas built for
Jabberwocky blood sport and deadly machines skulk through the dark alleys of
abandoned glass apartments. The magical forests and quaint (if not a bit
strange) villages and cottages are replaced with a glittering metropolis: more
like that of science-fiction than fantasy, but familiar just the same. It’s a
pretty amazing world actually, despite Beddor not quite describing it as much
as I would have liked. It’s definitely an interesting take on the Wonderland we
all know.
Just as interesting as the take on Wonderland as a landscape
is the take on all the characters. The book is set up in such a way that the
Alice in Wonderland that we know is a warped version of a little girl’s stories
about her kingdom Wonderland. Alice is actually Alyss, the princess and heir of
one of the most powerful imaginations in all of Wonderland. The White Rabbit is
Alyss’ twitchy tutor Bibwit Harte, and the Mad Hatter is Hatter Madigan, Alyss’
solemn bodyguard with hidden blades in his trademark top hat; and this is just
to name a few. Like the landscape of Wonderland, the characters we know have
been turned on their heads and an original twist added to them, but once again
Beddor’s lack of prose really drags it down as the characters are described as
they would be in a screenplay (that is to say with two sentences dedicated to
physical description and that’s it) and their dialogue falls flat more often
than not.
Ambitious is the best word to sum up The Looking Glass Wars. It’s ambitious in the scope of the story
and the originality but in how it was executed it falls short. Beddor might
know what needs to be done with a screenplay but a novel is another organism
entirely. Unfortunately, Beddor just doesn’t have the chops for novel writing
and (in the sequels especially) it shows.
My final thoughts on The
Looking Glass Wars are that it’s a decent story. It reads like a screenplay
and not a novel in some scenes and the sequels it spawned (Seeing Redd and ArchEnemy)
read almost play by play like a screenplay but The Looking Glass Wars is a decent read. The characters all had
interesting flairs that were inspired by the original tale (or in the story the
tale that was based off of Alyss’ observations on her homeland) and the setting
was vast in its originality–I’m still curious about it after having read it
quite a while ago so it definitely gets points for that. The prose was a
tipping point for me however, it just wasn’t up to snuff and too much like a
screenplay during action and dialogue sequences. All in all, The Looking Glass Wars gets a two out of
five from me: okay but certainly not as far down the rabbit hole as I would
have liked!
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