After Alice is a 2015 fantasy novel by Gregory Maguire. It was published by William Morrow in October 2015. The novel is a retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The novel follows Ada, Alice's friend, who arrives a moment too late to prevent Alice from going down the rabbit hole and ends up taking a trip to Wonderland herself. Ada traverses Wonderland to try and bring her friend home. Meanwhile, Ada's governess Miss and Alice's sister Lydia search for the missing girls.
While I wanted to enjoy this story, I feel like Maguire chose to put the wrong amount of emphasis on certain parts of this novel. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I read the blurb on the back of this book, I was expecting a story about a new character traveling through Wonderland and getting to experience it for the first time. Perhaps the reader would get to see new parts of Wonderland that weren't mention, or were barely touched upon, in Carroll's original story. Unfortunately, that isn't what happens in this novel. Over half of the novel focuses on events happening in Victorian England as opposed to Wonderland itself. Ada's governess Miss Armstrong searches for Ada while Lydia is more concerned with learning about the visitor, Mr. Winter, than her missing sister. There is also a section of Lydia's story where discussions about slavery and evolution occur. While slavery was still happening in America when Alice in Wonderland is set, and Charles Darwin is a character in this story, around the time he released The Origin of Species, these topics felt out of place with the rest of the story. The commentary on those topics were almost completely unnecessary and distracted from the story Maguire set out to tell. While some may have wondered what happened in England while Alice was in Wonderland, the chapters taking place in Victorian England really slowed the story down and distracted from the parts of the story I wanted to read most.
The chapters of the story that did not focus on life in Victorian London took place in Wonderland. Sadly, Ada's adventure through Wonderland was far less entertaining and exciting as Alice's. For the majority of Ada's adventure in Wonderland, she's simply trying to find Alice and has no adventures for herself. She often arrives just after an iconic scene from Alice in Wonderland has ended, missing all of the excitement and most of the wonder. For example, she arrives at the Mad Hatter's tea party after Alice has already left. Ada could've had her own adventure, but instead spends page after page chasing after Alice and not being able to truly experience Wonderland. Due to a combination of too much emphasis on Victorian England, and no excitement in the Wonderland chapters, I found After Alice to be rather boring.
I chose to read this book because I loved Maguire's more famous work, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I was amazed by the character work and character development he created in that story.He turned a character who was seen as pure evil, the Wicked Witch, and gave her personality and complex motivations. I was expecting the same to happen in After Alice, but sadly we don't get that. While there are a plethora of characters, none are fully-fleshed out. Lydia is a stereotypical self-involved teenager and Ada's most notable character trait is a dislike for her governess and the fact that she's awkward. The characters aren't really characters, and thus there's no character growth or real character arcs that take place. It's difficult for me to read a novel where I don't connect, or even like, a single character, and that's what happened here.
While I wasn't a fan of this book overall, there were some things that I enjoyed. Maguire's writing style has always enraptured me. He excels at writing his descriptions and creating a clear, vivid picture of the world for the reader. In the case of After Alice, he took great pains to try and replicate Lewis Carroll's clever writing, and in places, he achieves that goal. He gets closer than most Alice-inspired works do at capturing Carroll's voice, and while I didn't enjoy the plot overall, his ability to imitate the original work kept me closing the book and giving up.
Overall, I have to say that After Alice simply wasn't the novel for me. The writing is amazing, but the plot and character-work left me feeling unfulfilled. My main issues with the novel stem from one factor: the story is incredibly boring. There's no wonder in Wonderland and while the blurb promises a new story, the promise goes unfulfilled.
Rating: 1.7 Stars
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