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On the Saturday of Comic Con, I had decided not to carry anything with me. Two days of carrying my ubiquitous button bag, full of convention swag and notebooks, had left me with sore shoulders and back, and I was going to spend all day in panels instead of buying more stuff, so I determined to travel light. Just my camera and a single notebook so I could take notes in said panels.
I hit a snag when I realized that I was standing in a lot of lines, and I had nothing to read. Knowing that I was planning to spend a good 2 hours standing in line for The Mutant Chronicles, and an hour or so in line for the panel before that, I hit the convention floor looking for a book, because a comic wouldn't last long enough. None of the publishers were handing out anything free that I didn't already have sitting back at the hotel room, so I had to actually buy something. What I bought was The Looking Glass Wars, which looked like it might be interesting. I mean, it had robotic card soldiers on the cover, and they looked possibly steampunk. Plus it was the first book of a trilogy, so if I liked it, I'd have more books to buy in the future.
Unfortunately, the book didn't live up to the promise of its interesting, slightly-metallic bronzy cover, with the legend "Fantasy has just declared war on reality!" That might partially have something to do with the fact that fantasy really did no such thing, in fact, it barely intruded on reality, and then it took its war back to fantasy-land, leaving reality slightly confused.
As you might guess by the title, The Looking Glass Wars is a re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland. It purports to be the true story, casting Lewis Carroll as a well-meaning man who retold the story to better suit his audience. This conceit turned Chris off right away, as he's a fan of the original, but I (having sadly never read the original, only having watched the Disney adaptation) thought it might be interesting and gave it a chance, ignoring all of his scoffing and dirty looks (in the direction of the book, not me).
Before I get into my review, let me say that although I have not read the original book, I do understand that it was heavily influenced/allegorical of the political climate of England in the day. And I fully agree that taking the story and re-imagining it basically strips it of all of that and makes it a lesser thing. Nonetheless, it had steampunk-looking robots on the cover so I felt I could overlook all of that. Robot armies crush your allegory! Rarh!
Beddor really has some interesting ideas, which made me really want to like the book. If only he had expressed them better, I might have enjoyed the story and felt compelled to pick up the rest of the trilogy. Instead I read through it quickly, waiting for it to get better, which it never really did.
To be honest, I probably wouldn't have picked the book up at all if I had noticed that it was a young adult novel. I know there's some good work being done in YA fantasy, but like anything that's popular, there's also a lot of drek. In their rush to capitalize on the popularity of Harry Potter, publishers seem to be snatching up almost anything that can be marketed as YA fantasy, and probably aren't taking enough time to give it a good edit before sending it to press. The Looking Glass Wars definitely read like it could have been a stronger story if it had gone through one or two more drafts.
The first writing mistake that Beddor makes is something that I would really expect from a book geared towards an even younger audience than this one is. Especially in the beginning, everything is so damned twee, everyone loves Princess Alyss, everything is cupcakes and roses, and the narrative is almost cutesy. Since the cover lead me to expect a dark version of Wonderland, this had me almost gagging. Through in some serious cliches, like the commoner who loves the princess and the snobbish kid who everyone hates, and you realize pretty much from the start that you're not in for a great bit of literature.
But hey, things are obviously going to get worse for the character, so maybe the story will get better by contrast? I mean, it's more poignant when things go bad if you know how good things were before, right? And while the story does get better after the evil aunt Redd comes along and kills people and takes over the queendom, the book never elevates itself even close to the level that I was hoping for.
In better hands, the idea of The Mad Hatter as the queen's elite bodyguard and The Cheshire Cat as an anthropomorphic, shape-shifting assassin with nine lives would have been cool. So would the robotic card soldiers, the looking glass travel, and the idea of "dark imagination" as Wonderland's form of black magic. Unfortunately, all of these come across as interesting concepts that aren't fully realized.
One big problem is that a lot of things aren't properly described or explained. Take the card soldiers on the cover. They look like robots, but they are apparently some sort of living, thinking creature. I think that they and the chessmen were both separate, intelligent species, different from people only in their physiology. But Beddor never fully explains this, leaving me to just assume. The chessmen, being on the side of the good guys, get to show limited personality. The card soldiers basically just exist to be a practically faceless enemy that the good guys can kill without remorse. There are plenty of hints that they're actual thinking people, but nothing is really done with it.
My other complaints are much more nitpicky, the sort of thing that you may only notice if you've studied writing or are very analytic. The narrative has a bad habit of shifting from third person limited to third person omniscient and then back to limited (but focused on a different character) within the space of a few paragraphs. And then there's the very uneven handling of time, where a few years pass for one character, then we switch to another character where a few days pass, then a few more years for the first, then a few more days for the other. Maybe it's just because I keep time very even in my books, and this wouldn't annoy anyone else, but it really annoyed me.
There are parts of the book that approach awesomeness. Under the rule of the evil Redd, Wonderland takes on a dystopian tone inspired by such works as 1984. This was the darkness I was looking for. Redd has given Wonderland a higher level of technology, but she also uses that tech to keep her people in line. I would have liked more of this. I think that if the reader was shown more of how bad things were, they would be more invested in the good guys winning in the end. And I'm a fan of a good dystopian story, especially given the times that we live in now.
Ultimately, I feel like The Looking Glass Wars is a book that's not quite sure what it wants to be. It has the narrative style of a kid's book, jarring with the darker nature of some of the later parts of the story. It wants to work off the ideas in Lewis Carroll's book, alternately showing respect for him and then practically thumbing its nose at him. It wants to express an interesting interpretation of Wonderland, but doesn't want to take the time to explain things enough to engross the reader.
Admittedly, my opinion may be in the minority. The booth for this book had not just the rest of the trilogy, but a comic book based on it, and they were talking about games that were in the works, too. And as I was searching the Facebook "Visual Bookshelf" application to add this to my read list, I saw that it had a lot of positive reviews. I hesitate to recommend it, but maybe it would be good for a tween who is looking for more fantasy to devour.
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