Heartless
by Marissa Meyer
(Feiwel & Friends, 2016); audiobook read by Rebecca Soler (Macmillan, 2019)
Meyer seems delighted to revisit Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland but relies on it too much. Stripped of rehash the original content is torturously belaboured, seeding a mystery for dullards and styling a plodding romance that fails utterly to convince as the Queen’s backstory.
Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends
by Alberto Manguel; ill. Alberto Manguel (Yale University Press, 2019)
A series of non-fiction vignettes, each of which takes a literary figure as its starting point. Manguel is widely read and lets his intellect wander, musing about this and that and not very much. His insights are engaging enough in small doses.
Labyrinth
dir. Jim Henson (1986)
Henson tries to capture the same sense of whimsy as Alice in Wonderland, but—like most adaptors of that work—underwhelms. The delightful visuals and kooky ideas (and Bowie!) are offset by a rambling story and child acting lamentably of the 1980s.
Alice in Wonderland
dir. Jonathan Miller (BBC, 1966)
An unwatchably surreal black-and-white adaptation in no way redeemed by its bevy of renowned actors and music by Ravi Shankar. Fifty years on and for one sixtieth of the time invested, viewers should YouTube ‘Prince of Parties’ by Flight of the Conchords.
The Alice Behind Wonderland
by Simon Winchester (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Starting from a picture Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) took of seven-year-old Alice Liddell, Winchester examines how the off-kilter allure of Wonderland derived in part from Dodgson’s failed attempts to capture childhood’s essence through wedding his two budding obsessions: photography and Alice.