Absolutely fantastic! A fast, and great read.. I CANNOT wait to read the other 2 in the series!!! If you liked the original Alice in Wonderland and are open minded you will love Frank Beddor's version of a childhood fairy tale..it is dark and awesome! ( )

A clever twist on Alyss in Wonderland. All the characters are there -- just different.

Rewrite of Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland. Exciting tale, sometimes over the top, but none the less fun to read. Not sure if I have enough interest in this Wonderland's future to read the next book in the series. ( )

I'll confess first thing that I did not finish this book. I had heard of it and thought it sounded fun, an expansion of Wonderland that would seek to preserve Carroll's wonderful cleverness and sense of random dreaminess. Well, it didn't.

The first problem is how the book thumbs its nose at the original story of Alice in Wonderland. The opening scene of this book portrays Charles Dodgson in a very ugly light, showing him as a liar and a thief. Beddor's whole premise is that Alice Liddell, Dodgson's muse, was actually a fugitive from Wonderland and was sorely disappointed with his "re-imagining" of her adventures. She calls him "cruel" for lying about her story, with some angry denunciations of the poetry. She thinks "he'd transformed her memories of a world alive with hope and possibility and danger into make-believe, the foolish stuff of children" (p. 3, my emphasis). Alice in Wonderland is, according to Alice, a "stupid, nonsensical book" (p. 4).

Wow, can't you just feel the respect for Dodgson here? Nice. You would think Beddor would show a little respect for the genius he's piggybacking. But no, to make his book work he has to make Dodgson look bad, so Beddor can tell the "real" story.

I can't get along well with a book that starts off by calling its source stupid, when that source has been an undisputed classic of children's literature for well over a century. Alice in Wonderland is not stupid, or nonsensical in a negative way; in fact, it's far more imaginative and clever than Beddor's lackluster, clichéd re-imagining could ever hope to be.

And Alice in Wonderland has far more interesting characters than The Looking Glass Wars. I started rolling my eyes when we read how the king loves his wife, the Queen, because of her (politically correct) strength and firm decisions — oh spare me. Lame! The characters have about as much dimension as paper dolls. Alyss is a brat and everyone around her is so stereotypical and boring, stock characters lifted ineptly from better works.

Don't even get me started on the abysmal prose. When we come to the first battle and Beddor starts writing about "adrenaline-induced war cries" and "agony-infused moans," I almost gave an agony-infused moan myself (p. 27). And these two doozies came in the same sentence, no less! You have to wonder if Beddor is TRYING to hurt his readers. Wouldn't "agonized moans" be so much better? "Agony-infused" makes me think of someone injecting agony into the moans with a needle. (Hand me that moan, would you? I've got to infuse it.) And the book is full of similar problems: jerky sentence structure, unintentionally funny word choices, and clichéd descriptions.

With the ugly disrespect for Charles Dodgson, the flat characters, and the horrible prose, I found I just couldn't force myself to keep going. It was quite a pity because I'd been looking forward to this series for awhile, and even waited until I had procured the second book before starting this one. That was a mistake! Both are going up on PaperBackSwap pronto, in hopes that someone else will be able to enjoy them. But I doubt it. ( )

I'd give it 3.5/4 stars for a creative twist on the Alice stories, but 2 stars for the writing (stilted, forced, awkward) and the characters (unbelievable as children and lacking depth as adults). I doubt I'll read the next book.