Follow the White Rabbit: Throwback Review

   As some of you may know, summer is the busiest time of year for public librarians due to most of us hosting Summer Reading Programs in our libraries. I have been CRAZY busy the last couple of months, and have not had a chance to finish any of the 12 books I am currently reading (yes, I am reading 12 books at the same time. What? Like that's weird????) so today's post is throwback review. It was originally posted in 2015 in my old, now defunct blog "Shut Up And Read Something" which has not been updated in ages and will not be updated ever again. 

   So, without further ado, here is my review of Follow the White Rabbit by Kellie Sheridan. Enjoy!

    Full disclosure of librarian shame: I have never been a fan of Alice in Wonderland. I found both Alice and Through the Looking Glass to be silly, sort of pointless, and pretty much boring. 

    Even the movie versions have not been favorites, as much as I love Disney cartoons and anything with Johnny Depp's gorgeous face attached to it.

    I have to say though, Kellie Sheridan's Follow the White Rabbit seems to be a very promising (if far too short) re-introduction into the world of Wonderland.

The story takes the original, familiar tale and moves a couple hundred years into the future, into our time - a time of turmoil in Wonderland. It seems Alice's first visit changed the very nature of the physics of this strange world, turning it into something at once more mundane and also extremely delicate and fragile. Animals can no longer speak. Magic seems to have all but vanished. Things now make sense... which in Wonderland, is absolute nonsense.

    But, there are rumors... whispers that somewhere in a far off place there is a "new" Alice. A girl who must be found and brought back to restore the balance of unbalance if the desperate citizens of Wonderland have any hope to save their world.

   Sheridan does a good job of re-creating the old story... leaving it up to the reader to figure out who the old beloved characters might be (yes, there is a mad hatter, some queens and a white rabbit) while re-vamping them in a way that makes them completely new and fresh.

    My biggest gripe is that at only about 100 pages, it reads more like a short story than a real book, and it was over WAY before things got really interesting.

Still, I'm actually looking forward to the second part, Awake and Dreaming if it ever gets an actual publication date, which it still does not have. 

Final Rating: 3/5 bookmarks.