2.5

Leaning a bit more to three stars, so I might boost it later on. This was enjoyable, but not really up my alley. I don't hate it, but I don't like it that much either. I've definitely read retelling or reimaginations that I've liked more. It's defiantly not bad, but it's just not my favourite. The Goodreads standards for 2 stars "It's okay" is how I feel about this.

I just thought there would be a bit more to this. And I've probably already read it too as I was having a lot of deja vu, but also thinking "this can't be it, there's more right?" and there wasn't. It's quite short.

I'm also not a fan of the story structure either. I prefer plot-based things and am not a fan of episodic, seemingly unrelated chapters. However, this is not the worse example of this style that I've read. There's a lot more cohesion and continuity to it. ( )

Users of well-known college texts are aware of the phenomenon of books being passed on from author to author. My college physics text, for instance, was still called "Sears and Zemansky" after Sears and Zemansky were dead and even their immediate successor was retired from the project.

In those cases, however, there was at least continuity of authorship. In this case, the "second edition" was published 113 years after the death of author Charles Dodgson -- and almost 150 years after the first edition. This is not a second edition in any normal sense.

It isn't a very good reprint, either; on the very first page of Carroll's text, I noticed two typos, one of which ("tinisest" for "tiniest") should have been caught by a spellchecker and the other (lack of italic in "not more than once a minute") should have been caught by anyone who knows the Alice books. I didn't read the rest of the text -- after all, I have six other editions of Alice's Adventures -- but that's a scary rate.

So don't buy this book for the text. You can get a cheaper, and probably better, version elsewhere.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't buy the book. Because it isn't just a text of Alice's Adventures (although readers should be aware that it doesn't include Through the Looking Glass). The main value lies in the appendices -- of which there are twelve, totaling more than half the contents of the book. This includes a text of Dodgson's original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (although it should be noted that this is typeset, with the illustrations reduced; if you really want to read Under Ground, then get the British Library's facsimile edition). There is a text of Dodgson's watered-down Nursery Alice, which serves mostly to show how treacly Dodgson became in his old age. There is Dodgson's "Alice on the Stage," which includes his story of how the tale came about, and Alice's 1932 recollections. There are a dozen pages of reprints of early reviews, and copies of most of the poems Dodgson parodied. There are samples of contemporary children's literature. And there are some of Dodgson's photos of the Liddell children (although not, as the section name might make you think, all his photos of the girls). There are short excerpts of Dodgson's diary and letters.

None of the items in this book is unique to this volume. The diary and letters have been published by others; the poems can be found in The Annotated Alice and elsewhere; there is a much better edition of Under Ground, and the extensive introduction to this book is often rather silly (will people please stop taking William Empson seriously? Dodgson was an autistic, not a paedophile, and his friendship with Alice was quite autistic). Don't make this your first edition of Alice. Nor even your second. But if you want to have a portable version with a lot of additional information, this might be a good "traveling Alice." ( )