Book review: Alice by Christina Henry

Title: Alice (Alice Chronicles #1)
Author: Christina Henry
Publisher: Titan Books
Release date: 28th June 2016
Synopsis: In a warren of crumbling buildings and desperate people called the Old City, there stands a hospital with cinderblock walls which echo with the screams of the poor souls inside.In the hospital, there is a woman. Her hair, once blonde, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn't remember why she's in such a terrible place-just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood...Then, one night, a fire at the hospital gives the woman a chance to escape, tumbling out of the hole that imprisoned her, leaving her free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago.Only something else has escaped with her. Something dark. Something powerful.And to find the truth, she will have to track this beast to the very heart of the Old City, where the rabbit waits for his Alice.

Review: I think its safe to say one of the books we can all agree on loving at DarkReader is Alice in Wonderland..there's just something about the books and the way in which the characters have become part of our lives that shouts out to me. I also love a good transformation book and after the dreadful film this year I need a good surge of something to make up for it. Enter Alice. Henry has taken all the key elements of Alice in Wonderland, and rather than retelling the story has taken the story on and put them into her own world and her own frameworks. 

The great thing about stories like this is that we already have opinions and feeling towards characters, we know how they act and react so then for me it becomes interesting to see how this is...or in a lot of cases isn't in this book. Like the Rabbit for instance...I think power went to his head because woooah! I also love how the character have these anthropomorphic states of form (boom there's my english a-level in full use) so rather than just being animals that have human qualities they are actually human and you can imagine each on vividly, like Cheshire I imagine as a male Hepzibah Smith, plump and enjoying all the things around her. 

This isn't a happy tale though it's dark and full of grit...more adult than the world alice finds herself in originally, more madness and vice to corrupt and anger to give her drive, along with Hatch. 

They were an interesting pair. Alice having been confined in an asylum for so long doesn't have the assurity and the boldness that she once did and this is something she rally has to grow into with the book. Then you have Hatch whose characters is mad in a complete different way...its more raw and rough than the hatter we are all used to. But his character was strong and protective so there was a really nice balance between how we viewed him based on what we knew of him and how Alice fed into this. 

This was a whole new take on going down the rabbit hole and I'm very very excited for the adventure to come. In the way the Wicked really build that world, I feel like this has really strong potential to do this for Alice, to keep this world going in a whole new way!