Author: Cameron Jace
Publisher: Cameron Jace
Rating: WARTY!
This novel, which has an astounding 72 chapters (they're quite short), is an oddity in that it's credited on the cover to Cameron Jace, but is actually copyrighted to Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl. I know! Weird, huh? It's yet another YA novel rooted in fairy tales, but this one also seems to draw at least part if its inspiration from ABC's Once Upon a Time in Wonderland itself a spin-off from Once Upon a Time, a short-lived show featuring Alice as a young woman who spent a large part of her childhood in an institution for the reality-challenged. In that series, Alice is a strong-willed and self-possessed female character who can take care of herself, so naturally the old white men who run things are not going to let something like that flourish. But I digress.
This is also another YA novel told in first person PoV because you know it's not legal to tell YA stories any other person, don't you?! The limitation of this person becomes crystally clear when the author is periodically forced to switch to third person to relate events elsewhere in the hospital. Why this was schizophrenic person-switching was done is as much a mystery as it is irritating. Perhaps to try and convey a sense of insanity? It does achieve that rather spectacularly, but it;s irritating as hell, which is why I didn't finish this drivel.
This novel begins very much the same way as the TV show, with Alice Pleasance Wonder, patient number 1832 (which is the year in which Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born), trying to break out of the institution, and failing as she becomes paralyzed by her fear of mirrors and by her Tiger Lily plant (which is her only companion) abruptly telling her that she's insane.
In that same institution, is held a patient known as Carter Pillar. Evidently some sort of homage to Hannibal Lecter, Carter is a serial killer, who escaped justice by pretending to be insane. Now he's evidently escaped this place, too - but he's done it before and he always returns.
This novel is replete with such sly references to Alice in Wonderland, but some bits and pieces made me wonder, such as, on page 17, "...cold-blooded serial killer disguising as an insane man." I would question the use of 'disguising' in place of disguised'. On that same page we encounter "...because neither the Interpol nor FBI..." which would have read better had it read, "...because neither Interpol nor the FBI...", and then there's "A series of uninterrupted laughter..." which makes no sense at all. This was an added irritant in an already irritating book.
Alice apparently killed all her classmates and her boyfriend on a school bus somehow, and blamed it upon creatures from Wonderland. Is she telling the truth or is she really insane? In the end, I didn't care. It's sad to see such a good idea (even if unoriginal) wasted so badly.
