A fictionalized account of the life of Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, nee Liddell, the woman generally supposed to be the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. Her childhood friendship with Charles Dodgson, her brief romance with Prince Leopold, and her eventual marriage to Reginald Hargreaves are all part of this novel, but the thread that runs through the whole thing is the question of whether Dodgson behaved inappropriately towards her, and what caused the sudden break between him and the Liddell family when Alice was 11 years old.

This was a fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable read, skirting the edges of the historical record and playing around in the hazy places left by destroyed letters and missing diaries. It sent me down many Wikipedia rabbit holes (yes, see what I did there), and I feel like I learned a lot about several Victorian figures and the Oxford of the mid-1800s. I was also freshly irritated at Victorian social mores as embodied in Alice's mother and older sister, just as the author intended. If you enjoy reading about this period, or like to look behind the curtain at the creation of beloved literary classics, I would recommend this book to you. ( )

I had no idea Alice in Wonderland was based on a real person! I have never watched the movie in full nor ever really had a desire to, until I finished reading this book.

I felt so many emotions when I was reading from disgust, heartbreak, annoyance, happiness, sadness you name it I probably felt it with this read. I enjoyed that the author used Alice's real events and created a story from her viewpoint. ( )

I really loved this book. One of my favorite pieces at the Met is one of Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) photgraphs of Alice Liddell, the caption mentions the mysterious circumstances of their relationship and I've always been curious about it.

I don't know much about the actual occurences but based on the author's note, it seems like she did a wonderful job melding what is and isn't known with her vision of what happened in Alice Liddel's life. I also found her character Alice to be very human and relatable, and I liked that it showed her at different points in her life.

Really good stuff :) ( )

This was one of those books that I wanted to love. It was a book about how narrative shapes one's identity and the identities that are forced upon us to perform, the identities we envision for ourselves and the distance between these idealized selves and the way in which we're perceived. Or, at least that was the book I wanted it to be.

In reality, this book was more like an Austen novel: focused on British women and their prospects. Which, I mean, is fine, if you like that sort of thing.

I guess I'm also not enough of a historical fiction lover. The creepiness with which Charles Dodgson was portrayed made my skin crawl. I half wanted to shake the book and say: "You know he was a real person, right? You can't just make up whatever you want about him." I think the way that Dodgson (and JM Barie) tend to be portrayed in retrospective fictional pieces as sketchy pedophiles says a lot of really negative things about our society and without getting into a feminist rant, it was hard to read this book without internally getting into a snit over it. ( )

I have never actually read the story of Alice in Wonderland or any of the other Alice books (I have seen the animated movie though), and I thought this sounded interesting. It was a good book, kind of a little slow in some parts, but kept a decent pace throughout. I didn't know that Lewis Carroll was a pen name, and had no idea of this background. I wonder, though, how much of this book is accurate and how much is poetic license. The author states at the end that Alice's and Dodgson's letters were burned, so we'll never know for sure how true this book is. I know the author did all the research she could and made it as accurate as evidence would allow. All in all, this was a good story, and it makes me want to finally read the original story, along with some other biographies to see what other authors have made of this history. ( )