Review: Wonderland by Robert McKay

Publisher: McKay Manor Publishing
Release date: August 20, 2015
Format: ebook
Pages: 187
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Teenage Alice didn’t mean to end up on Wonderland, but the living spaceship she commandeered had other plans, and he was very late.

Abandoned on an unfamiliar planet, Alice’s first day as a space pirate has fallen into madness. Caterpillars? Mad hatters? A Jabberwock? A queen known for chopping off heads? Alice must face all Wonderland can throw at her if she’s to take back possession of The White Rabbit and leave Wonderland in one piece.

MY THOUGHTS

I received a copy of this ebook from the author in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book in the Intergalactic Fairy Tales series and is a retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This book was adventurous and so epic! It’s set mostly on a strange planet called Wonderland that is ruled by a controlling and ruthless queen. Our heroine, Alice, has always wanted to be a pirate. When she is presented with the opportunity to go on an adventure, she leaps at the chance…but she gets a little more than what she had signed up for.

This book has everything! It has a snarky talking spaceship shaped like a rabbit. It has space and the Imagisphere, which is a world that is completely imagined and changes at the Queen’s will. There’s an almighty sword and even a cyborg hare. This book really kept me on my toes and I never knew what to expect.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Wonderland as much as I did. Alice is 13 years old and I usually have a hard time connecting with younger characters but this book really took me back to my childhood and I was able to forgive some of the things that would have normally felt juvenile. I was immersed in the world and for the most part, I felt like I was part of the action. It never really felt like I was looking in from the outside.

The story was a lot of fun. At the beginning, I was a bit worried that it would be too close of a retelling to the original Alice in Wonderland. It seemed to be very similar initially, with the exception of it being set in space. But then it went in a completely different direction, which I really loved. It started to feel like a different story with some familiar elements, rather than just Alice in Wonderland set in space. Alice also became friends with a lot of the side characters and I really appreciated that they were all a part of the action. They each had their own role in the story and weren’t just there to be interesting. I particularly liked the Cheshire cat. He was a very mysterious and quirky character.

I thought all of the action scenes were great. There was a lot more violence in the book than I had expected. Alice spends most of the book battling strange beasts and chopping guards down. It was kind of gruesome but very exciting to read about. I thought Robert McKay did a great job with making sure that the action-filled scenes all made sense. It was all brilliantly choreographed. However, I did think that the final battle at the end with the Jabberwock was a bit too long. To me, it seemed to lack a sense of urgency and I felt a little bit disconnected from it. I had a hard time imagining some of the things that were happening and it all just went over my head a little bit. But the rest of the action scenes were very well done.

My other small criticism is that the book didn’t flow as smoothly as I would have liked it to. Some of the chapters ended very abruptly and the transition between some of the chapters weren’t very good. It just felt like we were stopping in the middle of a scene and then picking up where we had left off, in the next chapter. It just broke the flow of the book for me and felt like it was stopping and starting. But other than that, I was happy with how easy the writing was to read.

There are definitely some loose threads, as there should be since it’s a first book in a series. But there are things that I wish had been better resolved within this first book. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing what the next instalment brings.

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