Lewis Carroll was a master of wordplay, and Frank Beddor certainly tries to keep up.
Perhaps one should say that Beddor takes a while to find his voice. Actually, the book is advertised as being for ages 10 and up, and that’s probably about right, although some readers that age may find it hard to get past the first few chapters. It’s just that it isn’t written at a five-year-old’s level of language, and it takes a while for Alyss to age enough that language and subject matter hit matching levels. That’s not because of the violence, which isn’t unreasonably graphic, or the themes (destiny, going home, being yourself no matter what other people want you to be, good versus evil - the usual), or the sex (there isn’t any). An axiom of children’s literature is that children want to read about children a little older than they are, so books about seven-year-olds usually target five-year-olds. It opens on Princess Alyss’ seventh birthday. She eventually met Carroll and told him her story, which he butchered in his novels.Īt first it’s hard to tell who the target audience of The Looking Glass Wars is.
You know the sort of thing: “What if ‘insert name of story here’ was based on something that really happened?” In this case, the idea is that the Alice Liddell who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was really Alyss Heart, heir to the throne of Wonderland, who ended up in Victorian England through a series of bizarre events that I will not spoil by explaining here, and was adopted by the Liddell family. The Looking Glass Wars is a revisionist fairy tale.
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