Alice of Oz by Terence Sullivan Book Review

Alice Liddell stepped through her family’s parlour mirror in 1858 and came back the next day to find that forty-three years had gone by. Her parents were long dead and the house was empty. The only person waiting for her was the headmistress of a home for “wayward” young women. Years later, at eighteen, Alice is still at Pastoria House in London, being “treated” for her memories of a white rabbit, a tea party and a land below ground. The latest cure is an ice bath. When the woman holding her under the water turns out to be someone she once trusted, Alice begins to suspect the madness isn’t hers.

Spoiler-Free Plot

Overnight, Miss Marker changes. She was the gentle assistant who used to take Alice for custard in Kensington Gardens, and now she’s cold, cruel and oddly grey. She locks Alice in the forbidden East Wing with its only other resident, Wendolyn Darling. Wendy is kind and graceful, and she carries her own impossible story: a flying boy, a land where children never age, and a baby daughter who was taken from her. The two of them become inseparable almost at once.

Then a glamorous stranger named Guinevere turns up to “rescue” them and brings them to a crumbling manor stuffed with gowns, jewelled slippers and numbered hatboxes. A dinner in the solarium looks horribly like the tea party from Alice’s dreams. In a single night Wendy vanishes, witches arrive, and Alice slips away through a mirror with the quiet, white-haired young driver, who always seems to have something to tell her.

She washes up on a beach in the Kingdom of Ev, a territory of Oz, where Queen Rosemarie takes her in. Her roses whisper. From there, Alice and Blinkem head north. On the way they pick up Tinkerton, a cheerful inventor, and his clockwork man Captain Tick Tock, and they meet Nimmie Minnie, a fierce Munchkin lawkeeper with a slingshot. Alice also befriends a feathered dragon whose home has been sealed in stone, and she names her Dinah, after her childhood cat. Gnomes are crawling up through the wells, queens keep insisting Alice is a witch, and something under the earth wants her very badly.

My Take On Alice of Oz

Sullivan’s best idea is also his simplest: what if Alice was never mad? The opening chapters at Pastoria House are properly chilling. The ice-bath therapy and the locked wings show “delusion” as a way of controlling women. Every time Alice tries to trust her own mind, she gets called hysterical, and the book makes you feel how lonely and maddening that is. Watching her slowly realise that her “dreams” were memories, and that the world had been lying to her and not the other way round, is deeply satisfying.

Alice herself is a delight. She’s sharp-tongued and stubborn, she reaches for Brontë when she’s angry (she wants to “set fire to Thornfield”), and she stays endlessly curious even when curiosity is plainly a bad idea. Her bond with Wendy is the emotional heart of the book. The quiet scene where the two of them sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a locked room hits much harder by the end, and I’ll leave it at that. My favourite running thread is Alice reading every animal she meets as if it were her old cat. She calms a fire-breathing dragon by treating it like a frightened kitten. Later she works out what Dinah is up to from the way she circles, the way a cat circles a cupboard. It’s a lovely, original way of showing how her mind works.

The book is full of memorable set pieces. A chess game with the Ruby Queen, Gayelette, doubles as an interrogation of Alice’s soul, and it’s one of the best scenes in the book. Nimmie steals every scene she’s in. Blinkem, the reserved prince who has carried a torch for Alice since boyhood, brings a tender slow-burn romance, and their picnic of cucumber sandwiches under the “pink toy soldiers” is sweet. The climax is spectacular: a storm Alice raises herself, in a flooding labyrinth of roses.

It isn’t a light read, though, and you should know what you’re walking into. The book calls itself adult dark fantasy and means it. Alongside Alice’s adventure runs a thread about Princess Languidere, whose chapters are some of the most disturbing I’ve read in a fantasy novel. They involve sexual coercion, animal cruelty and beheadings. Set against Alice’s often whimsical voice, that contrast can jar. The novel also juggles a lot of points of view and plot threads, so the middle section sometimes feels crowded. Much of the tension depends on adults deliberately keeping Alice in the dark. The book knows this (Alice calls it out again and again), but it can still test your patience. And this is very much a first instalment, with some of the biggest questions left for Book Two.

Still, the ending earns its revelations. Alice of Oz is ambitious, emotional and unafraid of the dark, and it gives one of literature’s most famous dreamers the vindication she deserves. If you like dark retellings and found families, you’ll want to follow Alice down whichever rabbit hole comes next.

Age Rating

18 years and above

Content Warning

Graphic Violence and Gore, Beheading and Body Horror, Sexual Coercion and Assault, Incestuous Sexual Content, Animal Cruelty and Death, Psychiatric Abuse and Forced Confinement, Torture, Murder, Death of Secondary Characters, Pregnancy Complications, Child Endangerment.

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