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Saturday, September 5, 2015

Review: Alice Takes Back Wonderland by David D. Hammons

Title: Alice Takes Back Wonderland
Author: David D. Hammons
Series: Stand-alone
Genre: Fairy Tale Retelling/YA/Adventure
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Publication Date: September 28th, 2015
Edition: Kindle
Source:  ARC received from Publisher for review
Purchase: Amazon US | Barnes and Noble | Book Depository | BAM

Synopsis:
     After ten years of being told she can't tell the difference between real life and a fairy tale, Alice finally stops believing in Wonderland. So when the White Rabbit shows up at her house, Alice thinks she's going crazy.
     Only when the White Rabbit kicks her down the rabbit hole does Alice realize that the magical land she visited as a child is real.
But all is not well in Wonderland.
     The Ace of Spades has taken over Wonderland and is systematically dismantling all that makes it wonderful. Plain is replacing wondrous, logical is replacing magical, and reason is destroying madness. Alice decides she must help the Mad Hatter and all those fighting to keep Wonderland wonderful. 
But how can she face such danger when she is just a girl?
     Alice must journey across the stars to unite an army. She discovers that fairy tales are real in the magical world beyond the rabbit hole. But they are not the fairy tales she knows. 
     Fairy tales have dangers and adventures of their own, and Alice must overcome the trials of these old stories if she wants to unite the lands against Ace.
     With the help of Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Snow White and heroes old and new, Alice may have the strength to take back Wonderland.


Review:

The synopsis kind of gives away a some of the story, but not enough to spoil the book. Fans of Once Upon a Time will love this book. The mash-up of all fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology makes this a truly unique re-telling, even though in some ways it reminds me of Once. 

I really liked Alice in this book, she took a little getting used to but that just means she had some good character development. She goes from this girl who is fairly unsure of herself, to the leader of an army. It was great watching her go through that process and meet all the fairy tales in the process. 

Her interactions with Peter were probably some of my favorites. They were pretty cute at times, and while I can't classify it as a romance exactly, but there was a sweet innocence to their growing relationship. Meeting the different versions of fairy-tales were great. Snow White and her seven dwarfs making Moonshine and smuggling contraband, to the people of Grimm.

Her journey was a lot of fun to read. There were moments of some silliness and the way some of the folktales and myths were woven in, but I still kind of loved it. There were a couple characters added that I thought were real people, and I wasn't sure why they were added with it's supposed to be fairy-tale people. But they were such minor characters that I just looked past it.

This was a stand-alone, but part of me wouldn't mind reading more. The epilogue did a nice job of tying some of the loose ends up, but there is just that lingering question of "I wonder if..." (Don't want to say much more since it's kind of a spoiler).

If you like re-tellings, and if you like OUaT, then I'd say you might like this book and to give it a read.

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