Mala Movies & TV Shops

Alice’s Adventure

My first impressions of this book were that it was like reading C.S. Lewis on cheap drugs. The events are complete non sequiturs and the changes in plot are worse.

It appears to be a spoiled child wandering in a world she does not understand, nor is willing to learn about – unlike Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe who seeks to understand the local customs and circumstances.

The book is very easy to read but it leaves distaste in my literary mouth. I know it is considered a classic but I just do not see it, and if I did not have to read it for school I would not have bothered to finish it.

(First written as Journal Reading Notes in 1999.)

Through the Looking Glass

Though this book is not much better than Alice’s Adventures, the chess motif and theme does make the book much more interesting. With the bossy, dominant Red Queen and the quiet, kind, messy white queen, the book is a study in contrasts.

The interweaving of the Nursery Rhyme Characters and the frequent fish poetry references does provide more continuity and a sense of sequential events than Alice’s first adventure. I also appreciated the linking of the cat at the beginning and end of the story.

It does still feel like Carroll did way too many opium pipes in his time.

(First written as Journal Reading Notes in 1999.)

Rating: 3 / 5

I rate Alice in Wonderland a 3 star rating. The author is very creative in this novel; she uses the literary element personifications through out the whole book. She does a very good job with this by how she portrays the character in the book, (ex: the Queen as a snob). Alice (the protagonist) starts off by following a white rabbit to a hole. This late and timid creature leads her into Wonderland. Wonderland is a place of creation and imagination. The dream like setting gives her the adventure, like a labyrinth. The fairytale like mood in the story gives a sense of fantasy, adventure as she meets and encounters many creatures of the dreamland world. She finds herself lost and goes along with what ever she comes across the unknown world. She finds herself with decisions and she has to make to get to one point to the other. I think that this story has really no point, its just nonsense of fairytale she tells to little kids. She even said that she told this during a trip to entertain three little girls. To me the story was a pointless adventure. Yes, she creates a great tone and mood for the setting yet the body of the story was boring to me. The only point I got from it was an internal conflict of whether to take one road or not, like whether to take and drink certain things and what she should do with the moment.
Rating: 3 / 5

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass are two interesting stories. When I was a child, I watched the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland and enjoyed it. I’ve watched it again recently and find it very strange. I came across the book, “Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass” in an old library at my Grandparent’s house. This was an old English version, which may have made it more difficult to read and comprehend then if it was in common dialect. The first story, Alice in Wonderland, is the better of the two. It tells of a dreamland that a seven-year old Alice is visiting. This book jumps around a lot, and it is difficult to keep track of who’s who by the end. The second story, “Through the Looking Glass”, was worse then the first one. It is once again in a dreamland of a world seen backwards from Alice’s own world in the reflection of a mirror. When Alice enters this world, there are about two chapters before they enter the difficult analagy of telling the story through a game of chess. This is extremely hard to follow, seeing as you have to visualize the chessboard in your mind. Each seperate story takes place on a different tile while Alice is a pawn waiting to be Queened. In the end of the story, she is Queened and has tea with the other two queens, that is, the white and red queens. The dissapointing conclusion was that Alice was really in her world the whole time and her kittens were the queens in the story. I found both stories a challenging read, and was relieved when the book was finally over!
Rating: 3 / 5