Alice

Dark urban fantasy version of Alice in Wonderland. Sounds great to me, right in my wheelhouse. Nice touch opening it in an insane asylum. If only it lived up to my expectations.

Other than the character names, this bears no resemblance to the source material. Characters have no personality, nothing even close to the original which is packed with weird, colorful characters. There is very little humor to be found, which is certainly one of things I loved best about the original.

But, let's say I forget about comparing it to the source material and think of it as a book on its own merits. Alice seems like an outline with dialogue, nothing is developed. The two main characters, Alice and Hatcher (who I assume is the Mad Hatter) have conveniently lost their memories, therefore the author doesn't have to develop character motivation. When convenient, suddenly they will remember part of their backstory to serve the plot. Hatcher and Alice know what to do based on dreams and visions instead of earning or learning anything. Dreams and visions are a weak device at the best of times and certainly shouldn't be used to replace character development. Not to mention that these people have no personality to speak of.

Mostly, Alice and Hatcher roam around the Old City (the crime-ridden part of a fantasy version of New York) and meet different evil and powerful denizens of this world. Except they're basically all the same. They look different and have different lairs, but can't tell you how they otherwise standout from each other. The Big Bad doesn't even get enough interaction to develop a personality.

The “dark fantasy” part revolves around the rape, torture, selling etc. of women and girls. No other crimes. All the baddies are men who want to consume women in some way or another. No other motivations from the villains, other than generic desire for “power.” Since this abuse of women isn't given any emotional resonance, it feels like a cheap trick.

I'm glad the book was short and fast moving. The ending itself though, was another problem. In the final conflict, Alice (who discovers at a convenient moment earlier that she is a magician) realizes she can just wish things to happen and uses this to dispatch with the person they've been chasing all this time. A bit anticlimactic, even though I wasn't that into the story, I expected a bit more to the final conflict after all the time spent on the setup.

Alice is a fantastical tale that is a retelling of Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the elements from Alice in Wonderland are there, some of them subverted in such a way that the story is at times almost unrecognizable, but in a good way. It isn't really a horror novel although horrific things do happen. This story runs more along the lines of magical realism. There are also a lot of parallels to the “real world” in it. Women sold into slavery, rape, abuse, neglect, mental illness. So if that isn't your cup of tea... well, it's not a fun read, but it certainly is a good one.

The book was really fast paced, there was so much happening that there wasn't any time to properly digest what I was reading, I just turned page after page, until the last one. It gets two points for being so “readable”, however, the more I sit on, the more I wish I'd just skipped this one. The writing was not phenomenal, the characters were underdeveloped and the ending was unexpectedly flat, but the action until that point kind of made up of for that.

However, I can't overlook the gratuitous sexual violence. I don't see how it added to the story. The men were portrayed as the scum of the earth, the most sadistic and vile subhumans that could possibly be. Even Hatcher, who wasn't like the rest, who had a heart of gold, supposedly, behaved dubiously on a couple occasions. The women were utterly defenseless in the face of relentless abuse. Why there were resigned to this fate, and not armed to their teeth, beats me. A lot of bad guys do end up dying by the end, but only because Alice finds out she has special powers.

I have to give some credit to the author though, I don't think there's been another book that made me this sick to my stomach. It's going to take all of Rainbow Roswell's books before I'm able to smile again. And at least 50 videos with puppies.