Frank Beddor

This is a good story and retelling of Alice in Wonderland. To be fair I love the world building and I love the characters however there is so much detailing into describing characters and things that it gets boring, he could've shorten some of the description just a bit which is why I gave it a 3 star.

Update: Reread
*“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”*
*“You can’t kill Imagination.”*

Welcome to the Wonderland you *thought* you knew… and then immediately realize you show more absolutely did not. ⚔️

🩸 What It’s About

Meet **Alyss Heart** — the *real* Alice — orphaned princess, heir to the Wonderland throne, and certified trauma survivor. When her murderous Aunt Redd stages a bloody coup (yes, Wonderland gets DARK), Alyss escapes through the Pool of Tears and crash-lands in Victorian London.

There, she meets a hopeful little writer named **Lewis Carroll** and entrusts him with the truth of her life so someone might rescue her.

…He butchers it.
He waters it down.
He spells her name wrong.
Sir really said: *Let me turn your trauma into a cute children’s book.* 😭📖

Meanwhile, her fiercely loyal royal bodyguard **Hatter Madigan** (aka: walking legend, emotional damage, certified badass) is tearing through worlds trying to find her and restore her to her rightful throne — so she can return to Wonderland and absolutely body Aunt Redd in a war powered by **Imagination itself**.

Forget mad tea parties — this is **war, grief, loyalty, swords, and shattered childhoods.**

💭 My Thoughts

I DNF’d this YEARS ago… but I came crawling back because:

1️⃣ Alice in Wonderland retelling? Say less.
2️⃣ A real girl trapped in our world who must return and reclaim her throne with imagination as her literal superpower? I was too intrigued to ignore it again.

And I’m SO glad I didn’t.

The plot? **Immaculate.**
The world-building? **Wild.**
The vibes? **Steampunk chaos meets dark fantasy heartbreak.**
Hatter Madigan? **Would die for him. Would follow him into war. Would let him emotionally destroy me.**

And The Cat being EVIL? 😈🗡️
Sir.
Excuse me.
**Absolutely feral and I loved every second of it.** 🐱🩸

This book feels like:

> Alice in Wonderland x Steampunk x War of the Roses x Childhood Trauma x “Imagination is a Weapon”

There *are* moments where the descriptions linger a *tiny* bit longer than necessary — but honestly? The payoff is worth it.

This was a full redemption arc for me and I will not be ignoring the rest of the series. 😌✨

🧷 Tropes

* 👑 Lost Heir / Rightful Queen
* 🪞 Dark Retelling
* ⚔️ Loyal Bodyguard
* 🩸 Evil Queen Aunt
* 🌪 Portal Fantasy
* 🕰 Steampunk Aesthetic
* 🪄 Imagination as Power
* 🐱 Villain Cat (because of course)
* 🏰 Fight for the Throne
* 🧠 Trauma + Growth
* 📖 Story Within a Story

If you thought Wonderland was whimsical and safe — **this book will absolutely correct that assumption.** show less

What an utter disappointment. The concept of a dark Wonderland is, of course, exhilarating, and the idea of fictional characters learning to grow up by association with the real world - particularly if they're children or teenagers - has a long and storied history in fiction.

Unfortunately, Frank Beddor is not really interested in these concepts, at least not from a literary perspective, and his writing style indicates a limited understanding of basic structural tenets of creative writing. As show more with most youth-oriented books that I read, I try to view it from the perspective of my cousins in that age group. This book, however, would barely satisfy them, written as it is in such a startlingly underplayed prose.

Beddor's main issues are threefold. First, his dialogue is woefully stilted, with all characters sounding like they walked out of the same Edwardian era children's book. Similar to my issues with the (overall more successful) Taran Wanderer series, characters speak in the same manner regardless of whether they are holding court or running from a maniacal killer. It severely limits audience engagement with the text, completely cutting side-swiping any attempts at paciness or narrative energy.

Second, the text has a bizarre approach to which parts of the narrative are crucial. While there are some beautiful ideas here (for instance, the Mad Hatter's decade spent searching for his mistress, where he becomes a kind of mythical figure in the lives of 19th century Europeans), many of the key character moments are rushed through (notably, young Alyss' relationship with Lewis Carroll) while we spend a tiring amount of time with the oppressed people back in Wonderland. I don't like to review works by saying what they should have done (honest, I don't!), but "The Looking Glass Wars" smacks of a missed opportunity to tell a cohesive story instead of a set of images.

Because, ultimately, that is the issue here. My third issue with the book encompasses all the problems (and occasional solid moments) mentioned above. Beddor wants to write a comic book or a graphic novel. There's a great concept here for a truly gorgeous visual world, one unifying Victorian decor with gothic fantasy. The story beats are adequate, if not extraordinary, but they would have made far more sense in a visual format. Instead, this feels as if a comic writer is trying to become a novelist by literally transferring the skills of one medium into another - and that almost never works.

I'm going to have to read a few of the rave reviews of this series in an attempt to understand what people see in this - perhaps they, too, have an overactive imagination and are able to overlay this empty husk of a story with some perceived depth from their own mind. I don't have any problem with readers doing that; we all have! (It's how many academics make a living, after all.) But it's always a shame when a book with an intriguing concept leaves me with such a sour taste. show less

Alyss Heart is a Princess in Wonderland who will one day become Queen. On the day of her seventh birthday however, Queen Genevieve's exiled older sister Redd attacks with her card soldiers and The Cat (her personal Assassin) in tow killing Queen Genevieve and her husband King Nolan. Alyss manages to escape aided by the Queen's bodyguard Hatter Madigan by jumping into the Pool of Tears. Alyss emerges alone in England in the 1800s, stranded with noone believing her tales of Wonderland. After show more getting caught stealing with a band of other orphans she is taken to an orphanage and eventually adopted by the Liddles.

One day she meets Charles Dodgson (the real name of Lewis Carroll) and takes a chance trusting him with her tale. When she starts to tell him about her best friend in Wonderland Dodge, he assumes that the character is based on him and decides to write a book which eventually becomes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is furious he has trivialised her life with this ridiculous tale of Cheshire Cats, Mad Hatters and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and refuses to have anything more to do with him. She starts to doubt herself and her imagination which is key to becoming Queen and becomes part of English society to be courted by a Prince.

Wonderland hasn't forgotten her however. In the 13 years she has been away Hatter has been wandering the world searching for her and eventually finds her. She is brought back to Wonderland which has become a cross between Nazi Germany and 1984 for a show down with her Aunt Redd. Alyss has her faithful companions beside her; Dodge, Hatter, General Doppleganger (who can split into two, General Dopple and General Ganger), her tutor Bibwit Harte (an anagram of White Rabbit), Molly and some of the white chess pieces. In Wonderland much is done using imagination and there is a fantastic battle between Redd and Alyss conducted Matrix style.

I can't say enough great things about this book. I loved it so much and am going straight off to start the sequel "Seeing Redd". A review at the start sums it up for me, "To say Beddor's revolutionary novel is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original would do justice for neither author". In a nutshell, The Looking Glass Wars is to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland what Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz. show less

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, show more 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. show less