Most Helpful Customer Reviews
124 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing work of literary fiction, December 13, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Summary:
Alice Liddell Hargreaves is an lonely old woman now, but once she was full of passion, fire, and true love. As a child, she was the muse of Mr. Dodgson, a professor at Oxford who used the pen name Lewis Carroll, and inspired the seminal classic that has been read and loved by millions. What Alice doesn't realize, though, is that her life will be both illuminated and shrouded by just one day in her life, a day when, at eleven years old, her life changes forever.
Review:
Alice I Have Been is a beautiful and incredibly written book that is difficult to describe. It's hard to pinpoint why it is so wonderful because there isn't just one reason; the book as a whole is expertly crafted. Melanie Benjamin's writing is simply sublime; it is the thread that holds the entire narrative together. It is fluid, poetic, and entirely alluring, drawing the reader into Alice's story and making sure they stay there until the book is over.
The depiction of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is both fascinating and disturbing. While he isn't explicitly portrayed as a pedophile, he definitely has an inappropriate relationship with Alice. There is an emotional connection between the two that is very difficult to comprehend and entirely disquieting. Benjamin manages to show it with dignity and grace, something that is very difficult to do with such a perturbing subject. By showing the friendship through the innocent eyes of Alice, Benjamin manages to turn something sinister into a childhood affection, without removing its disturbing quality.
Alice herself is an incredibly interesting character that is expertly written. She is naive and innocent at times, but also incredibly aware of how the world works. She lives her entire life in the shadow of a book that features her, yet sometimes seems to be not about her at all. It's up to Alice to rediscover the girl inside her, especially in the face of tragedy and despair.
I also appreciated how closely Melanie Benjamin stuck to Alice Liddell's real history in Alice I Have Been. Though this isn't exactly a historical novel, she has a long Author's Note at the back of the book in which she explains what is fact, what is fiction, and what parts of the book blur the lines between the two. It's very gratifying that Benjamin chose to stick that close to true events; it's clear that she undertook a lot of research before embarking on the journey that was Alice I Have Been.
Alice I Have Been is an incredible story that literary fiction fans won't want to miss. It's not necessary to have an intimate knowledge of Lewis Carroll's books in order to understand the book, though I'm sure it's helpful in appreciating its subtlety. Some background on Carroll/Dodgson is helpful, though a quick perusal of he section about Alice on his Wikipedia page is all the information you really need. It's an incredibly creative and well-written book that I can't recommend highly enough.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needs some editing, but really, not bad, December 28, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Alice I Have Been is the story of Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice in Wonderland. She met Charles Dodgson at the age of seven, and helped inspire his classic children's novel. Later, she supposedly had a relationship with Price Leopold, one of Queen Victoria's sons (never definitively proved; the author gives it much more importance than it might actually have been), married an English country gentleman, and had three sons.
I have mixed feelings about Alice I Have Been. On the one hand, it's a well-written and evocative story of a young woman's growth to adulthood. It kept me engaged all the way through, and the book had almost a magical tone to it. On the other, I felt that there definitely were some weaknesses.
The author takes a lot of liberty with the known historical facts. First, it is still debated about what really happened to cause the break between Dodgson and the Liddels. Melanie Benjamin attempts to fill in the blanks; and while she makes an admirable effort, I didn't, in the end believe it all. I also thought it odd (but this may have simply been a Victorian thing) that nobody thought that there was anything strange about Alice's relationship with Dodgson--even after the now-famous beggar girl photograph was taken (though it really is a haunting photograph).
The parts of the novel where things are purely fictional (as with Alice's supposed relationship with Prince Leopold, or the scenes with John Ruskin, who comes across as a lecherous, mad old buffoon here) are weaker, while the stuff that's based purely on fact is much, much better. When Alice meets Peter Llewellyn Davies in America, I felt that the author gave too much of a fatalistic importance to the meeting.
I enjoyed Melanie Bejamin's writing style immensely, but she has a habit of repeating herself in places (in once scene towards the end she mentions no fewer than three times that it's May!), and she suffers from bad word choice sometimes (as in, "me legs were as numb as my other senses." Maybe that's true, if ones legs are now the sixth sense...), and she uses Americanisms in several places. In addition, the author tends to hit her reader over the head with her theme of growing up, or the lack thereof. This is a novel that shows a lot of great promise, but in my opinion needed a better editor.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exquisite, tragic bio-novel, December 11, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This was a wonderful, poignant, heart-breaking book that will surely mean something to anyone who read Lewis Carroll's works in their youth. The "real" story, largely documented, of Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves unfolds in a first-person perspective, targeting three significant moments in her long life--her childhood encounters with C.L. Dodgson (Carroll) at ages 7 to 11, her young adulthood and ill-fated royal romance, and her later years of great strength and personal tragedy during and after World War I. While the decades-long narrative jumps may seem jarring at first, Benjamin provides plenty of flashbacks to flesh out the narrative. This approach provides the reader with plenty of tantalizing mini-mysteries that are resolved as the story moves forward, piece by piece.
And what emerges is a beautiful, tragic portrait of a literary inspiration and her enigmatic creator. Dodgson, so often judged by modern moral standards, comes across quite well in this novel, and I was very pleased to see that, by focusing solely on Alice's recollections, he remains shrouded in mystery, at least until a partial revelation in the novel's final pages. Naturally, of course, a large portion of the novel is devoted to the genuine question of his feelings towards Alice, made even more difficult to interpret today thanks to missing pages in Dodgson's famous diary (though this is not mentioned in the novel). All in all, I greatly enjoyed this story and highly recommend it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
