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Summary
Summary
A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.
Author Notes
Charles Luthwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury, England on January 27, 1832. He became a minister of the Church of England and a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the author, under his own name, of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, Symbolic Logic, and other scholarly treatises.
He is better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Using this name, he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He was also a pioneering photographer, and he took many pictures of young children, especially girls, with whom he seemed to empathize. He died on January 14, 1898.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Reader Reynolds buoyantly leads listeners down the rabbit hole and into the topsy-turvy world of Carroll's Wonderland. When the young Alice follows a waistcoat-wearing rabbit holding a pocket watch, she finds herself in a fantastical world of talking mice, disappearing cats, hookah-smoking caterpillars, fish-headed footmen, and babies who turn into pigs. She shrinks smaller than a mouse and grows tall as a tree, participates in a mad tea party, plays croquet using flamingos for mallets, and runs afoul of the ill-tempered Queen of Hearts, whose cry of "Off with their heads!" seems to be the answer to most anything. It is a madcap, nonsensical entertainment, and Reynolds leaps into this tale's telling with enthusiastic aplomb. Fully embracing the material, Reynolds delivers the author's whimsical prose, poetry, and quirky characters with just the right touch of theatricality: bigger than life, but not completely over-the-top. It is a fine-tuned, enjoyable performance that allows the wonder of Wonderland to shine. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Two splendid new interpretations by world-class illustrators. Oxenbury's fat volume, printed on sturdy stock and bound to survive for generations, has invitingly large type, wide margins, and a generosity of illustrations, including full-color double-page spreads that open wondrously flat, color vignettes, and additional sketches throughout. Oxenbury delineates the story's humor with a gentle hand. The Mad Hatter is part Simple Simon, part Chaplin's endearing Little Tramp; the pedantic White Rabbit furry and pink-eared; even the Duchess and Queen are rotund and marshmallow soft. Alice, a contemporary child with tousled yellow hair, wears sneakers and a sleeveless blue shift revealing bare legs. From her wide eyes to her youthful posture, this Alice is a figure that expresses the innocence that goes with the unquenchable curiosity the author gave her, though it's a bit at odds with her logical, argumentative side.Still, Oxenbury's illustrations have a sweetness of tone and an amiable spirit that especially recommend this edition for precocious younger listeners as well as for children in the middle grades. With somewhat larger pages and only half as many of them, Lisbeth Zwerger's Alice has some daunting expanses of unillustrated type. And yet this edition has another kind of power: where Oxenbury has created a magical world with funny, fabulous creatures and inviting landscapes, Zwerger invokes a surreal dreamland virtually devoid of background and with few details; yet its ambiance is so intensely realized that it inspires the reader's own imagination. Her sleek, brown-haired Alice, demure (despite her bright red hose) in a high-necked dress and dark vest, is a solemn, contemplative child. If Oxenbury's Alice is Carroll's ""child of the pure unclouded brow,"" Zwerger has her ""dreaming eyes of wonder""; and she's the one who looks ready and able to counter the mad quips of Wonderland's inhabitants with a child's relentless logic. In Zwerger's dreamy world, everything is disassociated: characters gaze into space rather than at each other; odd details are tucked here and there in the text like so many grins without their Cheshire cats; even the cups at the Mad Tea Party stand separate and solitary. Yet this apparent randomness of images and their placement-like the surreal quality of a dream-is actually extraordinarily purposeful. Zwerger's full-page paintings, especially, are exquisitely composed, with unexpected vantage points to give us dynamic new views of the events. Here's an Alice to use with young adults, and beyond; like the book itself, these illustrations open doors to many levels of creative interpretation. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 4^-6, younger for reading aloud. There is no end to the available editions of Alice, of course, but here is one worth having. It is in a nice big format, with an exquisite typeface, easy to read and to hold in the lap. It has a genial and erudite introduction by Leonard Marcus, with a bit of biography of Carroll and some Alice publishing history, but, most of all, there are unusual, engrossing illustrations. Morell has taken the original Tenniel images, placed them in collage with realia, and photographed the resultant construction in black-and-white. The artifact of the book is used to great effect: the hole the White Rabbit descends is cut into a large book; the Tenniel caterpillar and Alice peering over the mushroom's edge poke up from the pages of a book in a swirl of smoke; the tea party table is a big old book with a checkerboard cover. This edition illuminates the familiar story in ways that point up its essential, strange "magick." --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
New York Review of Books Review
BEING READ TO is one of life's best small luxuries, but it was until very recently reserved for children and a few select adults. Now any grown-up with a smartphone has tens of thousands of audiobooks readily at her disposal in the car, gym, kitchen or bed. The appeal of listening to a book is still, however, much entangled with deep memories of slipping under a parent's arm to have a story unfolded for you in a beloved voice. Is it any wonder, then, that the most celebrated audiobook narrators - in particular, Jim Dale, who has read the Harry Potter series for at least three generations of fans - acquire their own devout followings? The peculiar intimacy of modern audiobook narration (with earbuds, the narrator's voice seems to emanate from inside the listener's head) intensifies the old association with cozying up with Mom or Dad and a bedtime book. These performers may be unknown to the culture at large, but among the initiated they are adored; they could teach psychotherapists a thing or two about transference. Now that technology has fostered an audiobook boom (in the most recent figures, unit sales were up 20 percent between 2013 and 2014, and a vast majority of these were digital downloads rather than CDs), more traditional celebrities have been enlisted to read to us. Audible, the leading purveyor of downloadable audiobooks, has boosted the production of such projects, hiring movie stars like Kate Winslet and Colin Firth to narrate classics like Zola's "Thérèse Raquin" and Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair." But narrating a novel is a specialized skill, particularly when the text has dialogue from a wide variety of characters. The best narrators - Simon Vance and Katherine Kellgren are two names to conjure with - get called upon to do things dramatic actors rarely attempt, such as speak like someone much older or younger than themselves or as a member of the opposite sex. Furthermore, the descriptive language of many novels doesn't resemble natural speech. Intelligibly pronouncing the wayward sentences of Faulkner or the clause-dense prose of Henry James surpasses the capabilities of many actors. Some of these new celebrity narrations have been sublime, like Susan Sarandon's reading of Carson McCullers's "The Member of the Wedding." Others (Jake Gyllenhaal's "The Great Gatsby," for example) are uninspired. But it hardly matters how lackluster a celebrity narration may be; these recordings always seem to outsell their competitors and win gushing customer reviews, testimony to the fact that glamour trumps skill, even when you can't see the famous face reading to you. Bah! This makes even less sense when the book being narrated is for children. A case in point is Audible's recent production of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," read by Scarlett Johansson. Not that Johansson's performance is substandard; she acquits herself very well with a challenging text, creating distinct characterizations for such icons as the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter as well as an excellently feline Cheshire Cat. Her narration has its oddities - she gives some of the characters English accents, but not Alice, despite her use of Victorian figures of speech that sound weird when delivered in an American accent, and Johansson's working-class characters, even the rustics, all drift into Cockney. But these are quibbles, not serious reservations. Still, this recording doesn't have a pressing reason to exist. There are already dozens of recordings of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," including one narrated by Jim Dale. I'd be surprised if anyone has raised a child under 8 who would be more thrilled to be read to by ScarJo than by Dale, but if such parents exist, surely they wouldn't be interested in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" in the first place? You'd think they'd have briskly moved the kids along to the "Gossip Girl" books. No, Johansson is clearly a narrator choice pitched to celebrity-dazzled adults, and to be fair, "Alice" is a book whose appeal defies age. Personally, I'd prefer to hear it read by someone more adept at the accents, and besides Dale, the options along those lines include such titans as Christopher Plummer, Alan Bennett and Fiona Shaw. Also Michael York, but I'd be leery of that last one: York's reading of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" suffers from the forced, unctuous "Hello, children!" tone so often used by people who don't really like or understand kids but have somehow gotten saddled with the task of amusing them. This and other forms of hamminess are problems that plague the narration of children's audiobooks. A rule of thumb for anyone reading aloud to kids, whether there's a microphone in front of your face or not: Children prefer that you give it to them straight. This is why they have always gravitated toward the most unexpurgated editions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales they can get their hands on, despite adult efforts to bowdlerize the sex and violence. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not conceive of their original collection of folk tales - published in 1812 and gathered from sources ranging from older relatives and artsy friends to servants - as a book to be read by children. When it became a best seller commandeered for nursery use, the tales drew criticism as inappropriate material for tender ears, so the brothers issued increasingly cleanedup editions. But there remains something untamable about these enigmatic stories of cruel parents, brave tailors, cannibalistic witches, enchanted princes and princesses, and big bad wolves. A NEW RECORDING of selected tales from the Brothers Grimm produced by Listening Library uses the 1884 English translation by Margaret Hunt, which, rather like Baby Bear's porridge, falls somewhere between the unexpurgated and the totally neutered. Rapunzel has twins by the prince she somehow manages to take as a "husband" even though there was no priest up in that tower, but the wicked stepsisters do cut off a heel and a toe to fit into Cinderella's glass slipper, filling the shoe up with telltale blood. Each tale gets a different narrator, chosen from the starry firmament of the audiobook world: Vance, Kellgren, Dale, January LaVoy and Davina Porter among them, as well as Roy Dotrice, a legend for his performance of George R. R. Martin's series "A Song of Ice and Fire," the source for HBO's "Game of Thrones." Dotrice delivers the only biblically themed tale in the bunch and sounds like the voice of the Lord himself. Surprisingly, the most "acted" tales in this collection are not the most effective. Narrators like Vance and LaVoy, so skilled at crafting individual voices for diverse casts of characters, tend to sound as if they're overdoing it on fairy tales. The cackling witches, sneering dwarves, imperious queens and booming giants of folklore are already caricatured enough; vocal embellishments only flatten them further. The more subdued and nuanced readings here - from Grover Gardner, Alfred Molina and Bahni Turpin, among others - have greater power. That's because the only real character in any fairy tale is the teller, a voice transcending time and history. You could call it the voice of humanity itself, but on any given evening in childhood, it's also the voice of the human being you love best. Johansson creates distinct characterizations for the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter as well as an excellently feline Cheshire Cat. LAURA MILLER is a books columnist for Slate and the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-5-An oversized book containing 12 full-page illustrations, one per chapter, with various smaller pictures of story elements peppered throughout, similar to the layout and design Zwerger used in The Wizard of Oz (North-South, 1996). The pictures are done in muted watercolors with very simple lines. Despite the flawless artistry evident in the work, there is something missing from Zwerger's Alice, and that would appear to be Alice herself. The child is clearly seen full-face in only a single illustration, that of the mad tea party, and then her facial expression is blank and disinterested. Otherwise, she is merely glimpsed: in the distance, looking down, disappearing from the page, and in some cases headless. The illustration of Alice after she has drunk the liquid causing her to grow shows only her cramped knees. Carroll's Alice is a feisty participant in her adventures, but Zwerger portrays her more as a sleepwalker, giving readers no opportunity to see how she is reacting to the events around her, be they bizarre, nightmarish, or humorous. While adults may find the book interesting from a visual standpoint, either the original artwork by John Tenniel or Michael Hague's charming version (Holt, 1995), which has literally double the number of illustrations, will have more child appeal.-Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Girl falls down a rabbit hole, cries buckets, has a spot of bother about size, plays some croquet, and wakes up in time for tea. The quintessential Victorian children's classic, Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been gloriously re-envisioned by pop-up master Sabuda. The bizarre settings and rude creatures of Wonderland burst out with every turn of the page, starting with an ingenious peep-show rabbit hole and ending with an explosion of cards. She's a familiar Alice; Sabuda, while paying homage to original illustrator Sir John Tenniel, uses vibrant colors, thick black outlines, and foil to create a work that is uniquely his. The text is abridged with most of the nonsense poetry left out; perhaps this engaging version will send a few new fans to the original. Carroll, no slouch in the paper-engineering department himself (he designed a disappearing Cheshire Cat stamp case), would be pleased. (Picture book. All ages) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole1 Down the Rabbit-Hole ALICE WAS BEGINNING TO GET very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterward, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket , and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labeled "ORANGE MARMALADE," but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it. "Well!" thought Alice to herself, "after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!" (Which was very likely true.) Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the center of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think--" (for, you see, Alice had learned several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) "--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.) Presently she began again. "I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think--" (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?" (and she tried to curtsy as she spoke--fancy curtsying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) "And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere." Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. "Dinah'll miss me very much tonight, I should think!" (Dinah was the cat.) "I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at teatime. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?" And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, "Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, "Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?" when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof. There were doors all around the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again. Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time around, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; "and even if my head would go through," thought poor Alice, "it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin." For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it ("which certainly was not here before," said Alice), and around the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words "DRINK ME" beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say, "Drink me," but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. "No, I'll look first," she said, "and see whether it's marked ' poison ' or not"; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. However, this bottle was not marked "poison," so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavor of cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast), she very soon finished it off. "What a curious feeling!" said Alice. "I must be shutting up like a telescope." And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; "for it might end, you know," said Alice to herself, "in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?" And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing. After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried. "Come, there's no use in crying like that!" said Alice to herself, rather sharply. "I advise you to leave off this minute!" She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. "But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!" Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words "EAT ME" were beautifully marked in currants. "Well, I'll eat it," said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!" She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, "Which way? Which way?" holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake. Excerpted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
