This is dumb for two reasons: one, the Jabberwock does not exist in Wonderland. The most famous example of this is in Tim Burton’s ungodly nightmare of a film adaptation. The first is the temptation to make Alice fight the Jabberwock. There are two things that every retelling of Alice does, and neither of them make any sense, and both of them make me want to weep profusely and shield Lewis Carroll’s ghost’s eyes so he never has to know what has been done to his work. Not a good movie.)Īs anyone who has so much as accidentally read a word I’ve written knows, my very favorite book in the world is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and it is the great curse of my life to pick up retellings of it thinking I will love them and then hating them with my life. (On a sidenote, I just watched Blade Runner for the first time. If you told me that Andy Weir wrote this having never read any of those books, instead only having seen the movie adaptations of each one, I would say, “Only if the last time he watched those movies was a hundred years ago, and also he didn’t watch the movies, he watched the trailers, and not like in a movie theater where you’d be paying attention, but like they were playing before a VHS tape and he was fast-forwarding them to get to the movie he intended to watch, which was probably something very bad like Blade Runner, and so all he saw were random images.” The students of this particular school are Alice (of Wonderland fame), Wendy (fresh outta Neverland), and Dorothy (back from Oz). This book wishes it had a tenth of the creativity and fun and adventure). This is a graphic novel that imagines there is a boarding school for children who have returned from magical worlds (and if you’re saying “Wow, sounds an awful lot like Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series,” you take that back right now. Here is something very funny and cool that doesn’t remotely make me want to scream for a thousand years: When authors write retellings of books they apparently have never read.

Cheshire Crossing by Andy Weir