THE LOOKING GLASS WARS, Frank Beddor

Between this and Tiger Lily, you’d think the latter would’ve given me more trouble while I worked out how to address its flawed approach to racism and queer identity while also praising how it brought Barrie’s characters and world to life in a new way. Well, it came to a 50-50 split over which book gave me the splitting headache of these last four months. Where Tiger Lily and The Looking Glass Wars differ lies in how I can’t contribute much social criticism to the first (as you will see next week), while I have plenty of story-based issues with the second.

This blog reviews various works of fantasy, but my specialized interest is in reworked popular stories that, over a century later, still enthrall us. Sometimes I’m rewarded with works like Tiger Lily; while it’s not free of problems, it successfully respects and perpetuates the spirit of the original. Then we have The Looking Glass Wars. Oh, boy, do we ever. We have it so much that it’s prompted my longest review to date. I pray for my readers’ perseverance (if I have any readers at this point).

Let’s start with one of my biggest adaptation pet-peeves.

Some authors of derivative literature try to legitimize their work by claiming the beloved classic was “wrong.” It’s not all that uncommon, and for me it usually has the opposite effect intended. The trope could work if done tastefully, something that Beddor really wants to do but, dammit, it’s hard not to stick it to a dead celebrity. So he justifies Lewis Carroll’s stories as “wrong” with the claim that they’re misrepresentations of “real events” in the universe of The Looking Glass Wars.

If you’re confused, I can’t blame you. Let’s just look at Looking Glass in juxtaposition to its progenitors, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Contemporary authors who produce a retelling of Carroll’s books will, almost without fail, conflate them in a single storyline. These adapters don’t acknowledge that the world Alice enters through the looking-glass in the second book isn’t Wonderland; it’s just a reversal of her own world. An argument can be made that Haigha and Hatta are the March Hare and the Mad Hatter from the first book, so I won’t nitpick the popular habit of treating Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world as one and the same. I will nitpick that the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen become one person, with the QoH’s tendency to scream, “Off with their heads!” as the domineering trait. There’s a baffling cross-section of card and chess iconography that, again, makes more sense when you realize the living playing cards and chess pieces are from separate stories, and possibly separate worlds.

So, how many of these pitfalls does The Looking Glass Wars fall into? Oh, all of them, but at least Beddor owns his approach. It’s widely removed from Carroll’s inventions and insults their creator. That said, as a stand-alone universe it’s entertaining and imaginative.

Beddor's Alice is based both on the character in the books and Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddel. The prologue introduces her under the assumption this is Alice Liddel, having met Reverend Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s real name) and told him stories of a place called Wonderland. Except this is not the real Alice Liddel—no surprise. Dodgson presents her a copy of his completed manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a warped rendition of everything she told him. Enraged, she declares Dodgson a cruel man and hurries off, welling with anger and betrayal, while Dodgson silently puzzles over his innocent friend’s outrage. Beddor is trying to paint this fictional Carroll in a semi-sympathetic light, but he narratively functions as the great fool who will tell Alice’s story all wrong and drive his young friend to despair.

Wait, sorry, I forgot to mention something very important. One of the things Dodgson gets wrong is Alice’s name. It’s spelled ALYSS. Yep, it’s that kind of retelling. The heroine must be a unique snowflake, after all.

From the prologue we jump back in time and space to Wonderland and a slightly younger Alyss celebrating her seventh birthday party. The timeline remains linear afterward while also fragmenting in the perspectives of Princess Alyss, skilled bodyguard Hatter Madigan, royal guard Dodge Anders, and Alyss’s maniacal Aunt Redd, who seizes control of the kingdom in the middle of the girl’s birthday festivities. This royal coup launches Alyss into flight and her allies and all of Wonderland into a civil war and a dystopian cliché. 

While Beddor’s series qualifies as fantasy, some of the technology employed by both sides of the conflict blend magic and sci-fi logic, like the Cards as android soldiers for Red and Hatter’s hat of many spinning knives that sounds handy in a pinch. However, Wonderland is primarily grounded in magic powered by Imagination, which can lean toward White or Black. Naturally, our hero comes from a White Imagination heritage while her colorful adversary employs Black Imagination to rule the land with a cruel and sadistic will. Yet another fantasy series employs good magic vs. bad magic trope, but the use of imagination as a superpower runs more in line with the strangeness that the setting is meant to embody.

Revisions can be a fun or tiresome game of Spot that Redux. In Beddor’s book, Hatter Madigan is an obvious incarnation of the Mad Hatter, but he’s far from psychotic. Dependable, logical, even stoic in his duties to the Heart royal family, he helps Alyss escape Redd at the risk of his own life. The counterpart of Alyss’ tutor Bibwit Harte is not so clear until Alyss points out that Dodgson used an anagram of her teacher’s name: White Rabbit. Bibwit isn’t a rabbit, though, not even a humanoid one, but instead a . . . well, we don’t really know. Everyone calls him an albino because of his pale skin. He’s very long lived, having tutored Alyss’s great-grandmother in her formative years. Most significantly, he has huge, sensitive ears because, you know, he has to be the White Rabbit in Carroll’s “twisted” account, while not actually being a rabbit! So what is Bibwit? Never explained. My theory: he’s the child of a wizard and a house-elf who escaped to Wonderland to hide his shameful half-breed nature. If you check out the (quite lovely) illustrations in the middle of the book, you’ll see that Bibwit looks like a human-sized Dobby.

Back to the story: the first few chapters introduce the reader to the Wonderland setting and its crucial characters, then the plot sends Alyss on an accidental trip to a different world: ours, or the magic-less world of Victorian London. The details that Beddor injects while fleshing out Wonderland’s history, politics and other facets could amount to a book by themselves, but since he feels compelled to shove Alyss into peril as quickly as possible, there’s a mountain of dumped info that would’ve benefited from more build-up so relevant details could come in morsels rather than mouthfuls of exposition. The setting isn’t all that suffers; important character development gets lost in all the data. There’s little room for anyone to flourish outside their narrative functions. I like the Alyss-Dodge interactions, and I would’ve liked more nuanced relationships between Alyss and the rest of the people in her life, especially since Redd’s attack results in the deaths of several people close to her. There’s barely any emotional touchstone for her. Scarcely any feelings for her parents manifest beyond “they were good parents and I loved them.” Our villain lacks complexity, but Redd compensates by being a palpable threat, and the title of this book’s sequel, Seeing Redd! suggests she’ll have more opportunities to grow later on.

Despite her half-realized emotional ties to other characters, Alyss captures my interest and sympathy, as does Hatter Madigan. Her hasty exile lands her in a puddle in London while Hatter ends up in France. In his many years searching for her, making quite a stir with his hat-wielding skills, Alyss must cope with living on the streets with a gaggle of urchins, then being dragged to an orphanage, then entering the Liddel family as an adopted daughter. You can’t help feeling her pain as she not only reluctantly acclimates to this world but feels her powers of Imagination diminish to nothing. Then comes the (unintentional) gaslighting as she’s brought into “proper” society, forced to conform with our world’s reality. Her new tutor insists her name is spelled A-L-I-C-E, and her parents, especially Mrs. Liddel, berate her for talking about Wonderland to anyone at the risk of sounding insane. While the pace drags at times, there’s empathy to be had for Alyss as she starts to lose grip on what’s real. Rev. Dodgson is her last-ditch effort to make someone believe her stories, only to have them corrupted into a fictitious, whimsical tale for children. This blow proves to be the proverbial straw; Alice becomes an English lady compliant to her mother’s desires.

Given the book’s tagline (“Fantasy just declared war on reality”), I expected the story to become a psychological ride in which Alice and the readers question the definitions of reality, dream and delusion. That take on Carroll’s stories would’ve better meshed with his original themes. Unfortunately, while Alice falls into doubt about the realness of Wonderland, the readers never have to debate it. We witness Hatter bouncing around the world in search of Alyss; Redd dishes out bloody havoc on the queendom; the Alyssians, rebels faithful to the memory of the lost princess, continue their desperate efforts to undermine Redd. It reads more like Harry Potter or Star Wars in scale, and in that nothing can be accomplished without the true heir to the throne. It’s just another Chosen One fantasy story where Carroll’s altered characters mostly serve as window dressing. The trope is a reliable oldie that may be found in another Wonderland-inspired series, Splintered. Let's be frank: we should be sick to death of this plotline. Many readers might be when trying to get through Looking Glass. If you do eat it up (as I do about 70% of the time), Alyss has the appeal of a prodigal savior, but the execution of her return is a mixed bag.

When she’s brought back to Wonderland, Alyss just rolls with it, neither insisting it's a dream or a psychotic episode nor jumping right into the fight for her queendom. That she’s so passive, while understandable in her confusion, makes her willingness to undergo the trials necessary to become Wonderland’s true queen a bit hollow. The trial itself happens too quickly to let her come to terms with all the trauma she’s experienced, though Beddor does make an attempt. In the end, the climactic fight between Alyss and Redd takes priority. The battle’s conclusion is intriguing, at least, leaving things somewhat happily resolved yet open for the inevitable sequel. The cheesy closing line belies the fact that the war is far from over. Things are not settled between Alyss and her friend Dodge, for instance, as they’ve been driven apart by time and a thirst for vengeance. The ambivalent tone harkens to the endings of the Harry Potter installments, as they needed both closure and enough tension to hook readers for the next book. It frustrates attempts to judge Looking Glass as a complete work when it’s part of a continuum that’s waiting for the real ending. So I hold out hope that the tag line about fantasy versus reality will play out while I also dread how much more Beddor plans to undermine the man he owes this story to.

If you made it all the way through this review, then I assume I can continue to write longer posts like this and get away with it—if it’s necessary in the future. For those looking for a TLDR short-cut, it’s this: The Looking Glass Wars is a fun fantasy romp fulfilling many typical but enjoyable tropes, but it diverges from much of the Alice in Wonderland spirit and even pokes fun at Carroll for no other reason than to elevate this series. If that bothers you, I wouldn’t trouble with the book. If you find these faults forgivable, Looking Glass will divert you, maybe even to warrant a reading of Seeing Red! I still haven’t decided if this is my cup of tea.

Rating: 2.5/5