Review Four - book group at a distance

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Longer chapters made keeping apace on reading this book a little more challenging than our recent books but we did all manage to finish the book this weekend.

Mixing up our book genres is a great way to keep reading a fun activity and although I know I've read Alice more than once in the past it was like coming to a completely new story.

Kentishbookboy's thoughts are purple and mine (with interjections from Mr Norfolkbookworm this time) are in brown.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Synopsis:
Alice is spending time with her sister, and gets very bored listening to her read, so she begins to daydream. Alice's adventures lead her down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where she meets an array of curious and strange characters - including the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle and the grinning Cheshire Cat.

Alice is sitting with her sister, who is reading quietly, and is bored - the book doesn't seem to have pictures or illustrations and so Alice isn't interested. All of a sudden Alice notices a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking at a pocket watch, run by. Alice follows the rabbit down a rabbit hole and falls into a weird and wonderful world.

Dilemma:
Alice lands in a world where everything is utter nonsense. From always being tea time, to talking animals, and playing card soldiers, Wonderland is completely unique and confusing!

Alice is in a world where nothing makes sense, however familiar it looks. Cats grin, babies turn into pigs and Alice can't stay the same size. How is she going to survive her adventures, keep her head and return to her own world?

Morals/Themes
Morals: Believe in yourself what you can achieve
Themes: Try to make sense of the world around you.

It is a quite hard to pick out a moral or theme from this book. You could say that don't eat or drink anything you are unsure of (and checking it doesn't say poison isn't quite enough!) is a good lesson to take. That it is ok to be curious is potentially another one, as is being open minded to anything out of the ordinary.

Recommendation: 
I'm not sure whether to recommend this book because even though it's complete nonsense, it can also be quite difficult to understand in places. 3 1/2 stars

Hard to put into words how I feel about this book, the story is great and magical but it did feel a little bit of a slog at times. I can't say that children's literature has 'dumbed down' since Alice was published - you only have to look at The Umbrella Mouse to see that hard topics are covered - but something has definitely changed, and to be honest I think for the better.
I can't really say that my opinions are formed because I am more familiar with the Disney adaptation of the story - the Cheshire cat in that terrified me as a child and I will still switch over if I see the cartoon on!
I think I give the book 4 stars overall as so much of the book does remain in our consciousness today, even if the prose was hard work!

What I find most interesting is that Kentishbookboy highlights that the story is a dream/daydream from the very start, but when chatting to Mr Norfolkbookworm he was talking about the abrupt ending to the book - not even thinking that this was simply because Alice wakes up!

We're back to something more contemporary with our next book as it is the Michael Morpurgo novella I Believe in Unicorns.