Customer Reviews

The Looking Glass Wars (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (Looking Glass Wars (PB))

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I don't normally write book reviews and I have no intention of heading off in this direction too often, but "The Looking Glass Wars" inspired me enough to share my enthusiasm. Frank Beddor's book takes the premise of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" adventures and stands it on its head. Essentially, what Beddor does is re-imagine Carroll's fantasies as the true adventures of a young girl named Alyss (Carroll even got the name wrong, apparently!), a princess who lives in an alternate universe called Wonderland. As the book opens, she is the heir apparent about to celebrate her seventh birthday, but is forced to make an escape when her evil aunt murders her parents and lays claim to the throne. Fleeing through a `looking glass,' Alice is deposited in mid-18th century England, where she is soon relating her tales to an opportunistic English writer named Reverend Charles Dodgson (whose nom-de-plume -in reality -is Lewis Carroll).

While it is not necessary to know Carroll's work to enjoy "The Looking Glass Wars", it certainly would add to the reader's awareness of Beddor's humor. Throughout the book, he utilizes characters from Carroll's work in amusingly re-imagined forms; Here, the White Rabbit is a seven-foot tall albino tutor named Bibwit Harte (just unscramble the letters a bit and there you go). The Cheshire cat is actually a mercenary fighting for the evil Redd, who represents the wicked Queen of Hearts. The Mad Hatter is a loyalist named Hatter Madigan, who searches the Earth for Alice so he may return her to Wonderland and help her to regain the throne. The innately clever underpinning of Beddor's book is how he can gently poke fun at Carroll's work, by making his fantastical descriptions and flights of fancy as a basis for Alyss' reality. The staid, gray world of Victorian England stands in remarkable contrast to the rainbow hues of Wonderland, and the plot manipulations are consistently amusing. While I can't say for sure, it seems quite likely that "The Looking Glass Wars" will one day be a movie, especially since Beddor has previous film credits (as producer of `There's Something About Mary'). My advice is to read the book before somebody does the visualization for you, because imagining Wonderland for yourself is at least half of the fun. B+ Tom Ryan

When I first heard about the premise of this book my initial reaction was one of shock. A book in which people can learn the "truth" about Alice's Wonderland? What a great idea! And my goodness what an obvious one as well. You may not know it, but there are tons and tons of books out there, both for children and for adults, that talk about the "real" land of Oz. Everything from "Wicked" (both book and musical) to "The Wiz" to who knows what all. So why has nobody ever done the same thing with "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland"? There was a Disney Channel television show that vaguely touched on it, a nasty video game that reinterpreted it, countless pop songs and independent plays that work off of it, but never a children's book that gave us an alternate look into that world. Until now, that is. With glee I plucked Frank Beddor's book out of the hands of my colleagues and got down to reading it. Frank Beddor, a sometimes actor, sometimes stuntman, sometimes freestyle skier (this is all true), sometimes producer of "There's Something About Mary" has now decided to add "writer" to his resume. So how much should we expect from the fella who was John Cusack's skiing stunt double in "Better Off Dead"? As might be expected, not a heck of a whole lot. Beddor has a some interesting ideas, sure. I mean, the book's premise is a very strong one. And his writing is not, on the whole, bad. It just that Beddor hasn't a clue who his audience is or where he wants to go with this series. And it shows.

We're all familiar with the story of "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland". How the author Rev. Charles Dodgson (i.e. Lewis Carroll) was friends with Alice Lydell and conjured up a world of make-believe for her enjoyment. But what if it was the other way around? What if Alice had conjured up the world for Mr. Dodgson? And what if that world had not been an innocent place of joy and wordplay but rather a dangerous land from which she was an exiled queen? Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland was having a perfectly lovely life when, at the age of seven, her parents were dethroned and her world turned upside down by Alyss's evil Queen Redd. Now Alyss and her bodyguard Hatter Madigan have been thrown into our world with no obvious return to their beloved Wonderland. In our world Alyss is made to believe that everything that happened before was just a dream. Yet in her absence rebellious groups are forming against Redd's new dictatorship and they just need one thing: Princess Alyss must come home and take her rightful place as queen.

Cute premise. But the book, for all that it invokes Wonderland, is actually far more interested in war, battles, and strategy than the more detailed aspects of the land. You get to see Wonderland in its purest state for a brief chapter or two before the book erupts and the chance to enjoy this familiar-but-not-familiar land is gone. In interviews Beddor has said that as a kid he saw Lewis Carroll's books as "a girl's book". Obviously he has attempted to rectify the situation. People who go into "The Looking Glass Wars" expecting Carroll's wit, whimsy, or ability to play with words are going to be sorely disappointed. Beddor isn't afraid to display his contempt for Carroll's original creation right from the start as well. In this book Charles Dodgson is a weak-willed wimp of a man who's more interested in creating light-hearted fantasy when cold bloody reality is what's needed. It's obvious that Beddor couldn't make a joke or a humorous scene if his life depended on it. The closest thing you get is a brief practical joke by Alyss at the beginning of the book on her (I kid you not) albino tutor. From there on it its all blood, guts, death, despair, and predictability.

Beddor also shows a shocking lack of inventiveness when it comes to names. He's perfectly good at creating creepy counterparts to Carroll's original characters, of course. Hatter Madigan is a security version of the Mad Hatter. Redd is the Red Queen. But where does everybody live in this book? Wondertropolis of course. I don't suppose it's much worse than Frank L. Baum naming one of his characters Ozma, but sheesh. Wondertropolis? Turning Alice into Alyss is a nice touch and all but the inclusion of animals called adorable things like "tuttle-birds" and "gwynooks" shows that what Beddor wants to pull off with this book is in direct opposition to the story he took it from. One wonders why he didn't just create a new book entirely from scratch rather than drag Carroll's creation into the mix and risk the wrath of the pro-Carroll multitudes. The fact that I picked up this book to begin with answers my question.

One of the other problems I had with the book involved little seven-year-old Alyss and her best-friend Dodge crushing on one another as kids. At one point the (and I will emphasize this once again) SEVEN-year-old child commands Dodge to dance with her. He does and we read this passage, "He put an arm around Alyss's waist and moved with her in gentle circles. He had never touched the princess before - not like this. She smelled of sweet earth and powder. It was a clean, delicate smell. Did all girls smell like this or only princesses?". I'm now going to remind you yet again that this is a TEN-year-old boy with a SEVEN-year-old girl. Ten-year-old boys, with very few exceptions, do not like girls. And if they do like girls, they certainly do not like seven-year-old girls. And if they do like seven-year-old girls (and here we're getting into tricky territory) then they certainly do not go all wobbly when they touch them. Can't help but get a little sickened by the above passage? Join the club. And apparently Alyss's crush as a seven-year-old lasts good and strong until she's twenty-years-old. Uh-huh.

NOT that the book isn't amusing at times. There's enough fighting in here to satiate even the most bloodthirsty of readers. Fans of Garth Nix or those kids who lament that J.R.R. Tolkien just wasn't gory enough may find a kindred spirit in Beddor. The thing is, he makes the very odd choice of allowing Alice to grow into a twenty-year-old hottie. This sort of makes any future installments in the proposed trilogy difficult. And if Beddor is trying to aim this at teen audiences then he's picked the wrong publisher. I did like that Beddor did his homework and included some factual information about the real Alice Liddell in between his own fantasy. In some ways his mixing of myth and this new reality is rather well done. I liked the use of the Pool of Tears and how Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee had becomes generals. But Beddor also spots his text with slang like, "Duh" and he obviously rips off the whole hero-sees-dead-parents-in-a-mirror idea from the first Harry Potter book. For every fun and original moment in this book there's forty problems on the next page. To top it all off, the minute that you hear that Alyss must go through the Looking Glass Maze to become a queen, you know exactly how the book is going to end. So much for the element of surprise.

Beddor has his finger in as many different pies as possible. He wants video games and graphic novels and roller coasters and who knows what-all to tie-in to his beloved new world. You can't blame the guy, but you also can't help but remember other darlings of the media who had similar dreams smashed in front of them (paging Clive Barker's, "Abarat"...). In Germany this book has been published for adults. In the UK it was published for 10-14 year-olds. Here it will be thrown at children. I can't possibly predict the kind of reception the book will get from kids. I suspect, however, that many will be bored or confused by it while others lap it up like it was cream. It's fine for what it is, but do not expect a great deal of creativity in its creation. It's just nothing to crow about.

When I first heard about the book, I was curious but leery. The idea of a new take on Wonderland was intriguing, but I was left wondering what an author could really do with it. Apparently a lot, but I was left asking why it was necessary. But I picked it up anyway.

Frank Beddor, the author, has a vivid imagination, but everything he does truly springs out of Lewis Carroll's novel. He has some amusing twists and capricious renderings of characters, events, and hardware in Wonderland, but ultimately I was disappointed with this one. There just really wasn't enough of a difference, and the differences that were there flew in the face of everything I loved about the book.

The idea of an adult Alyss (see, Carroll gave us the incorrect spelling after schoolteachers forced Alyss to change her name to Alice) going back to Wonderland to lead a revolt against Queen Redd was interesting, but just didn't really come to life. Beddor's world-building seems good, and his pacing is excellent, but I would have liked to read something wholly original by him. He's a good writer, but being enamored of Wonderland doesn't do him justice in some ways.

The book is readable, and if you're truly curious I'd suggest waiting for the paperback. [...] has already slated the book for a deep discount, so that might work out for you too. I'd be interested in hearing any comments other readers might have on the book.

And I'll be looking for Beddor's first original work. Although that might be a ways off given the fact that there's a movie, an RPG game, comics, and other avenue in the works on this one.

The Looking Glass War is a modern look at the Alice in Wonderland tale. However, rather than following The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Beddor turns the classic tale on its ear. Our main character is Alyss and is the daughter of the King and Queen of Heart (note: Wonderland is a Queendom where the Queen is the power of the land, in this case, Hearts is the most powerful of the Suites because they established the Queendom). Other characters who transfer from Alice in Wonderland are Hatter Madigan (the Mad Hatter), Redd (the Queen of Hearts in the original work), Card Guards (similar, but different), and the Cat (the Cheshire Cat). Alyss is a young princess who's forced to leave Wonderland and enter our world. While here her tale is made into the classic stories we know (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). All thru the story though, Alyss wonders is her original thoughts on Wonderland were correct.

My Likes
This is an interesting adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Mr. Beddor has done an excellent take off on the original story and twisted things very nicely. Character descriptions are nicely done with a lot of creativity. What amazed me the most was how easily Mr. Beddor transitioned from Wonderland to our world and back. He shows this very nicely when Hatter Madigan transitions between Wonderland and our world several times to save Alyss. I also found Mr. Beddor's portrayal of the Cheshire Cat very interesting...

My Dislikes
Mr. Beddor brought technology in a little quick. The initial projection we get of Wonderland is about the 1850's and aligns fairly well with our world. With Alyss coming to our world, Red runs amok with technology and we see many different items that grow far outside of what Victorian England would have been able to support (actually, some of it would be difficult for our era). While nice for young readers, adults may find this distracting. Another dislike was getting use to some characters supporting good that I didn't expect (Hatter Madigan is one) and others I expected to support good being with evil (the Cheshire Cat was there). I admit that some of prejudice with this is driven by the original book and by the computer game American McGee's Alice.

My Rating
For most youths I believe this book would be a 4 star book (8-12 years old +/- in age). The action is fast for them and should keep them entertained. I also believe that most youths will enjoy the technology that Mr. Beddor presents (it's interesting to say the least). For adults (or teens) I see this as a 3 star book. I was entertained, but the story is to choppy and contrived. There's also some major time jumps where we turn the page and several years have passed without a good explanation for the reader. I really wanted to rate this one higher (I do have a fascination with Alyss, but for a re-do on Alice I prefer Amercian McGee's look at Alice), but for me it's just not strong enough to be worth 4 stars.

The reviews I've seen here seem to consist of either glowing praise or unbeliveable hatred. The book I read doesn't warrant either response.

It's "eh." It's not the worst book I've ever read. It was a relatively quick read, because it didn't give me very much to think about. It's certainly not what I would call good, either. It's a bit too much like what you might get if a hack Hollywood screenwriter enamored of True Lies got hold of Alice.

What I mean by that is- I didn't believe Wonderland, at all. I'm a great lover of fantasy, I have no trouble suspending disbelief for a good tale. But this Wonderland was too technically futuristic while simultaneously culturally simplistic to feel real. The characters did not behave in believable ways, given who they supposedly were.

Why would the Alyssians trust Jack of Spades? Everyone hated him. Why would anyone who wasn't ridiculously dim keep any of the cards suits around, even before Redd takes over, let alone require their child to marry one?

I liked the Caterpillars (although the opium smoking Buddha interpretation is by no means original). I thought Hatter Madigan and Molly Homburg were interesting, if never really explored. I liked the white rook, although I found it a little farfetched that he KEPT showing up at the last minute. Once or twice is amusing. Every time is too much.

I felt rather sad for the Cat, honestly. It was as if the author came up with this character purely for sadism's sake.

Redd was poorly concieved. I didn't believe her for a minute. And honestly, you have to believe the villain if a story is going to work. I won't outline the number of times I rolled my eyes at the cliched or dumb choices or references made- it would take too long. The Black Imagination vs. White Imagination thing was just a rehashing of Star Wars' Force, really. And it was used extremely inconsistently. The Black Imagination societies and stimulants referred to implied that all Wonderlanders could do (perhaps on a lesser scale) what Alyss and Redd could, but none of them ever showed any signs of that ability. And either way, supressing Black imagination as Queen Genevieve did is not so very different from suppressing White Imagination. There is no all-good or all-bad. For a story to be truly compelling, characters can't be that one-dimensional.

You need a bit of both, and this author doesn't seem to understand that except with Dodge, who is poorly thought out.

The best parts of the book were actually during Alyss' time as Alice, which was handled interestingly (if inaccurately. I know far too much about the subject, but I understand we are dealing with fiction, so I let it go).

So, it's not a book that will make you ill, as some have said, and you will probably even finish it. But if you require compelling story and characterization, you won't be itching for the sequel, or indeed for anything else by this author.

You may want to pick up Carroll's versions, though, and see what a real writer can do. (I was appalled to read a review here where a kid actually thought Carroll wrote The Looking Glass Wars as an adaptation of a Disney movie. FOR SHAME! Disney gutted and adapted the books by Carroll, as they did with almost every movie they've made. Please, please introduce your kids to the original works. Disney is diverting, but not one of their films holds a candle to the original.)

I really wanted to enjoy this book. I figured that the concept of Wonderland-as-reality is strong, and that surely Carroll's material would be a sturdy foundation for a trilogy of wonders.

Unfortunately, this book is more like the storyboard for a movie than a novel. Everything is described rather than experienced; events are driven by things that appear, rather than motivations.

For example, the various kinds of Evil Minions (Seekers, Glass Eyes, The Cut) have no point-of-view or reason to exist, except to attack our heros, who fight back and/or run away. Now this WORKS in a movie; visually you would understand the difference between a Seeker and a Glass Eye without any tedious explaining, but in a BOOK the author has to give us more than asserting that one critter flies and the other walks. There is no situation in the book in which one monster couldn't simply substitute for the other.

Likewise, the multiple chase scenes are tediously unmotivated. At one point, Dodge flees through the Crystal Continuum, chased by some Evil Minions (Glass Eyes? Card Soldiers? who cares?; nothing they do makes their identify matter.) It is a boring chase; all we really know is that he is being chased; we can't get emotionally involved and ultimately don't care that he escapes by a rather clever maneuver. Now in a movie, the visuals and music of the chase would supply plenty of emotion, but in the book, the author has to do more than was done here.

Another difficulty is that the Hero doesn't really do anything to deserve her ultimate victory, except to be born with super-powers and to follow directions. In the rather cloying ending, our Hero Alyss discovers a Valuable Lesson: that she can do anything if she has the imagination to do so. Or something. Visually, this might work in a made-for-children movie, but a book needs something of more substance, such as a sacrifice by the Hero to show she really does want and deserve her victory.

Perhaps the basic problem of the work is exposed by a running joke of no actual narrative consequence that would justify the space given it. The Evil Queen keeps forcing the hapless scholar to edit his book to suit her wishes, as he wrings his hands and reluctantly obeys. If only this book had had such an editor, it might have fulfilled its promise!

I really wanted to enjoy this book, and I hope it is made into the movie it carefully outlines, but for reading purposes, there are many novels of light fantasy better worth your time.

Alyss Heart of Wonderland bears little resemblance to the fairy tale Alice we all remember. In The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor, we have Wonderland to the tenth power. Kind of Alice in Wonderland meets The Matrix.

After her Aunt Redd succeeds in taking Wonderland's throne from her mother, Alyss escapes, led by Hatter Madigan through the Pool of Tears. They lose each other during the journey, and Alyss pops out of a puddle in Victorian England. No one believes her violent story - or that she's heir to the throne of another world. She is adopted by a family who believes her to be a little girl with a vivid - and frightening - imagination.

Befriended by a minister, Alyss thinks she has found someone to finally believe her story. He decides to put her story down into a book under a pen name, Lewis Carroll. When he presents Alyss with the book Alice in Wonderland, she realizes that he never believed her story, that it had only been fodder for a make-believe fairy tale.

Devastated, Alyss decides she's tired of being "Odd Alice" and settles in to her new life with the Liddell family, convincing herself that it was all just a dream.

But Hatter Madigan is still searching for Alyss, the rightful heir to the Wonderland throne. Wonderland has changed under Redd's rule - people live in fear of her evil temper, and Black Imagination is flourishing, while White Imagination has been outlawed. Wonderland's only hope is for Hatter to find Alyss and bring her back to battle Queen Redd.

This is one of the most inventive books I've read in a long time. I literally did not want to put it down! It is wonderfully written and will appeal to lovers of fantasy, old and young alike. It is darker than some juvenile fantasy: unlike the cartoon where the Queen of Hearts yells "Off with their heads!" quite ineffectually, in The Looking Glass Wars heads roll. If your children love Harry Potter or Inkheart, they will enjoy this book. It is the first in a planned trilogy. I picked it up because I will be receiving the second book to review soon, and I wanted to know how the story started. I can't wait to read part two, Seeing Redd.

I REALLY like creative retellings of stories, so I was pretty excited about The Looking Glass Wars. However, TLGW only holds some shallow and basically meaningless references to Alice in Wonderland. If he had changed some of the names around, Beddor could have gotten away with claiming that this was an original piece.

The prose itself is decent. The plot is ok, the action is actually kind of good. It's the characters that really get to me, they're flat and boring.

Alyss is cute and sympathetic as a little kid, but once she grows up she becomes this cardboard cutout that just happens to be beautiful and well educated. She's supposed to be smarter and more interested in substantial issues than most other women in our world, but the author never demonstrates this, he just claims that this is a quality that makes men so attracted to her. Grown up Alyss/Alice does a lot of going to parties to please her mother, putting on dresses to please her mother, and posing for pictures to please her mother. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, she just sort of floats around until she's needed. Then she doesn't show very much emotion or thought, it comes off as really flat.

The minute she returns to Wonderland, everyone somehow recognizes her as the lost princess even though she was presumed dead for several years and the last time she was seen was when she was seven.

Redd is one of the most boring villains to ever be written. She does a lot of screeching, yelling, and killing people for no reason. The author does not go into what exactly she had done as a young child to get disowned by her family. Redd takes delight in being called "Your Imperial Viciousness," which only helps a serious novel come off as campy.

Jack of Diamonds really made me wince. He wears a powdered white WIG just because he heard that nobles in other worlds do it? He has a giant behind that often makes him get stuck in chairs? Of all the bad qualities you can give a greedy opportunist and traitor, it's a big butt?? On a man?? Jack would have worked in some sort of slapstick comedy, but I don't think that was quite what Beddor was hoping for.

Dodge is the ultimate Gary Stu. He's a brilliant warrior but he also broods because of his dark past. I could say the same of the Mad Hatter character. I can see them being main characters in video games, but not realistic characters, alternate universe or not.

When I first read about The Cat, a deadly assassin who can morph from cute kitty to hideous man-cat, I thought, woooww. This is really over the top. Is this supposed to be campy? Guess not. Another failed attempt to make a truly evil character that just comes off as a joke. The Cat COULD have come off as more of a round character. I really liked that brief scene in which the feline assassin was playing with string. However, once again, Beddor tried too hard to make his villains come off as one sided and inhuman as possible. That just made his characters really boring and unbelievable.

This book is basically a shallow comic book turned into a novel. The super heroes are not quite super, the villains are not as interesting, but the exaggerated, impossible elements of comics are there. The action scenes sound like they belong in a hybrid of Anime and X-Men, which is perfectly fine. However, I find it a little iffy that Alyss suddenly turns into a warrior queen after a few hallucinated sword fight lessons.

This is a children's story in the sense that the characterization is oversimplified and dull. The black and white dichotomy is so stark that it's pathetic and boring. Good means beautiful, evil means ugly. Beddor offers good descriptions when he bothers to provide them.

I am seriously not that picky about characterization. I like fast paced genre novels. However, the characters in TLGW are a little too campy for me, and the worst part is, they're supposed to be serious.

I sort of feel that this book should not be marketed as a rewrite of Alice in Wonderland. I'm no purist, but instead of offering a creative reinterpretation, Beddor just took some names and vague resemblances and threw them into his novel-wanna-be comic book. I would even say that this book is riding off the coattails of Alice in Wonderland's fame without doing the canon justice. I give it a 1.5 star. It's worth a read if you check it out from the library, it's mild entertainment, but it's not that entertaining. Never have I winced so much at characters in a book just because they were so ridiculous.

From cover to cover, 'The Looking Glass Wars' fails by varying degrees thanks to an unstable narrative style and too much tongue in cheek, "aren't I witty?" blather. To believe in the reality of any work of fiction, the reader must be taken in like a fly to a cunning spider's lair. Frank Beddor, with the use of many elementary narrative tricks with very little follow through, weaves this book into a tangle of loopholes that have you guiltily attentive to the end the way many of us rubberneck at a car accident.

I picked this book up off the bookshelf because it has a terrific title, and then I read the prologue and got utterly hooked by it. What an intriguing premise! I was wild with curiosity by the time I bought my copy and brought it home. I opened the book, eager to read the whole thing in one sitting and enjoy it immensely.

And then I didn't.

The characters all start out interesting, but the things that make them interesting fall flat before around the middle point of the book. For instance, the main character starts out very young, has a string of traumatic experiences, and then the book almost completely skips over the next ten years of her life (as if they were irrelevant to the story, which I don't think they should have been), bringing her back as an adult. And a bitter, unimaginative, unlikeable adult to my mind, as well.

By the end of the book, it barely held my attention at all, as I found myself predicting every single plot point, groaning at each new cliche, and staring at the book in speechlessness at its unresolved, clearly-begging-to-hook-readers-in-for-a-sequel-instead-of-bothering-to-finish-the-story ending. It felt contrived, it felt cliche, and it felt like a cop out.

Now, I say this reluctantly, because the I thought the premise behind the book was brilliant. I'm also probably prejudiced, because I hate stories where main characters spend half or more of the book angsting, instead of doing something interesting about their problems. And I'm also prejudiced against stories where I can see every plot point coming, and yet the author still builds up to them for ages as if they were real plot twists.

I'm also a very picky reader, so there are probably lots of other people out there who will love this book. I know I thought the idea behind it was magnificent, which is why I was so crushed when I found its implementation disappointing.

(Although I will add that I thought Hatter was extremely cool, and stayed so all the way through the book. Go Frank Beddor, for including him!)