This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
*This review contains mild spoilers for the book being reviewed. Mostly they’ll be things with no real impact on the story, or things you would very obviously have been able to guess – like “good triumphs over evil in the end” level obvious. Any paragraph with more spoilers than that will be marked as such.
While with my boyfriend and his family at their trailer on the weekend, I read a book my dad had recommended in passing to me last summer. Alice by Christina Henry is a gritty, dark retelling of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, grimdark reinterpretations of Wonderland are prolific. There are probably too many. And not all of them are enjoyable. But that in itself isn’t a reason to avoid this book, I don’t think. And to quote my best friend when I told her what I was reading:
We all have weaknesses.
While there were a few things I didn’t really like about the book, on the whole I gave it a 4 out of 5 stars when I marked it as read on GoodReads (and in a new section of my bujo, too). I thought it did some interesting things that other reinterpretations haven’t tried, and the story itself was quite compelling. I read the whole book in a day – which, by the way, is something I haven’t done in quite a while, and it felt great.
The most obvious matter to address about Alice is the presence of rampant sexual violence in the story and the world it takes place in. Rape, sex slavery, and illicit prostitution and sex work are absolutely everywhere in this novel. I will say that there was relatively little explicit description of sex violence, and what there was was directly relevant to the story. While I’m not a fan at all of sexual violence used for shock value or to illustrate a point in media, for a lot of reasons, I felt that in this book it was different because the violence had a very definite impact on the story and on the main character. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who avoided this book because they didn’t want to read about that violence – it’s obviously a very sensitive and disturbing subject for many people to read about. But I was able to stomach it, and I felt that it tied into the narrative in a very important way.
Perhaps the best thing about this novel is how it functions as the story of the recovery of a trauma victim. I’ll return to that theme often in my review. Alice experienced, and escaped, horrific physical, emotional, and sexual violence at the age of sixteen, ten years before the beginning of the story. As her memories of the experience – almost the only explicit description of sexual violence in the book, and broken up into short fragments throughout the story – begin to come back to her, they inform her responses to the sexual violence she sees in the world around her. Her past has dramatically affected her mental health, and her recovering memories of that past affect her health even further.
On the note of mental health, I wanted to take a moment to address the beginning of the novel: Alice and her friend Hatcher are being held in an asylum, where they’ve been trapped for a long time. It’s terrifying, and awful. But, unlike so much horror media, the mental hospital isn’t depicted as being scary because it’s full of weird, dangerous “crazy” people. It’s considerably more realistic – most of the patients appear to be harmless. The place is terrifying because of the dismal treatment of the patients by hospital staff. That’s a frighteningly common problem in the real world, and it’s horrible, but it’s rarely depicted in fiction. While relatively little of the story takes place in the asylum, we’re painted a clear picture of its evils: patients are kept in empty cells with nothing to do, not even a bed to sleep on. They almost never leave. They’re drugged against their will. They’re bathed once a week, during which they are not permitted to do anything themselves, and if they move they’re hurt and threatened. Even Alice’s family has no regard for her – their visits are rare and their disdain for her is clear. None of this is doing anything to help Alice recover from her experiences – if anything, the asylum is only compounding her trauma. The drugs suppress her memories and dull her senses, and the loneliness and boredom make it nearly impossible for her to retain the sanity and sense she has left. If she and Hatcher hadn’t been able to communicate through a hole in the wall, it’s quite possible that neither of them would have survived as long as they did.
Alice is a tale full of grey morality and spends a lot of its time ruminating on how morality changes circumstantially. Hatcher clearly has no qualms with killing people in the crime-ridden Old City, chopping off heads at the slightest provocation and apparently even enjoying it. Alice, however, who originally comes from a very different place and isn’t accustomed to this survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle, spends a while hesitating when it comes to violence. But she soon finds that some people don’t deserve to live. She kills to protect Hatcher and other people she cares for or feels are innocent victims. When it becomes apparent that her abuser is caught up in their quest and they can’t avoid him as originally planned, she becomes quite eager to kill him, too. And murder isn’t the only moral qualm in the novel – another question that comes up more than once is, who can be saved? If Alice and Hatcher had stopped to save other patients in their escape from the burning asylum, they wouldn’t have made it out alive. If they had stopped to rescue or help certain individuals along their journey, they may not have been able to eventually defeat the big villain, who was leaving much greater destruction in his wake. That said, Alice eventually draws a line, and when she can save someone she does. This is not a book devoid of kindness, and while the world it takes place in is harsh, Alice is able to carve out moments of mercy.
The relationship between Alice and Hatcher is definitely unhealthy, in ways that vary in obviousness. Some things are pretty heavily implied, some are more between the lines and depend on the reader’s perspective and personal experience. Only once or twice is it explicit, such as one passage late in the book where Alice thinks about the age difference between herself and Hatcher (somewhere between ten and fourteen years – the math is inconsistent, which drives me crazy, but we’ll see if the discrepancy ever gets resolved) and about how ten years of trauma and imprisonment, from age 16 to 26, means that she hasn’t really had the chance to mature like she should have. Her age, maturity, and amount of life experience don’t match up with each other, leaving her in a sort of limbo state, and at best she’s still a decade younger than Hatcher. However, I find the relationship really interesting for a few reasons. One is that unhealthy relationships are so rarely framed as such in fiction that it’s almost strangely refreshing to see one depicted this way, with clear imbalances. Another is that Alice and Hatcher are both deeply broken, unhealthy people – and a totally healthy relationship, realistically, may not even be possible for them. However, the care they have for each other is very clear, and it is clear that when they can, they both try their best to be respectful and caring to each other.
Because of their traumas and illnesses, both Alice and Hatcher can be kind of hard to understand and relate to at first, but as you read and start to get into their mindsets, they both make sense and function well. Their internal logic remains intact and their motivations become more and more understandable as the story moves on. I have a feeling (aided by some unhappy GoodReads reviews) that not everyone would find it easy to get into the right frame of mind to sympathize with and understand Alice and Hatcher, but speaking as someone with reasonably extensive experience with mental illness and the ways people can behave in the wake of trauma, I didn’t personally find it very hard – it was just a matter of settling into the right groove, so to speak. Alice, whose perspective the reader gets more of, is definitely dealing with PTSD on top of her long-term memory loss. Hatcher is less consistent – in addition to his own long-term and occasional short-term memory loss, he experiences a very short temper and violent outbursts, confusion, flashbacks, and more. He’s less predictable and probably more dangerous than Alice, which some people may find unlikable, but personally I think he’s very interesting. Paired with a personality that makes him efficient, fiercely protective of his loved ones, and incredibly enduring, he’s complicated but has a lot of depth and, if you ask me, believability as a survivor of all his experiences.
Related to the relationship between Alice and Hatcher is Alice’s wavering independence, which is closely related to her status as a trauma survivor. While I’m all here for a strong heroine who doesn’t need a man’s support to save the day, the way that Hatcher supports Alice (and the way that she supports him, too, when he needs it) is so important for her story. There are key moments when Alice makes hugely important steps for herself all alone, but there are also times when all her experiences make it impossible for her to cope with things by herself – and in those moments, Hatcher is there as her support system. By the same token, she saves him as well, from hypnotic monsters as well as from his own breakdowns. Both Alice and Hatcher are ill in ways that make them incapable of functioning all by themselves, but their mutual understanding means that they are able to look after one another and work well as a team. They keep each other afloat. I’ve seen this in real-world relationships and it can be such an incredibly important part of learning to live with illness. The way that Alice and Hatcher look after and support each other may not be the most fulfilling of independent-woman storylines, but it’s realistic and helps communicate the very important message that recovery is non-linear and it’s okay to need help.
Henry’s writing is really strong, with a solid plot and an engrossing story. Alice was one of those books that drew me in enough to lose awareness of the world around me (at least until I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes in the evening). As a horror it was subtle in a way, not made up so much of specific imagery as it was of built-up impressions of a truly awful world. As a retelling of Alice in Wonderland it was less direct than many, with a new plot and some of the famous characters taking on roles very different from their original ones, going so far as to make the Rabbit a villain. In fact, you could almost read it as a story completely unrelated to Alice in Wonderland, and merely borrowing the famous story’s motifs and names to create associations and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of. When I looked it up on GoodReads I discovered there’s a sequel, which is interesting – the end of the novel definitely left Alice and Hatcher with more to do, but not necessarily the definite impression that it was the beginning of the series. That said, I’m intrigued, and I’m hoping to pick up the second one sometime this summer.