Book Review: The Looking Glass Wars

The Looking Glass Wars (audiobook)
by  Frank Beddor
Date Read:  4/3/14
Rating: ★ ★

NOTE: The image is having problems uploading, so I cannot upload the image of the cover at the time.  I will upload when the error stops.

Well, this definitely wasn’t a favorite book of mine…but it was entertaining enough.  Do I feel like I need to read any sequels?  No.  Was it a fun twist on the Alice in Wonderland story?  Yes.

If you are a fan of Alice in Wonderland or the world or characters, you should probably read this book.  I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass about a year ago, and to be honest, it was all a bit too weird for me.  As a Disney movie, it worked.  As a Disney TV show, I loved it as a kid.  But the actual book was a little too convoluted for my tastes.  I know it’s not supposed to make sense…but it seemed to cross over the line from crazy to unintelligible.  I know there are many that disagree with me, so if you do, you’ll probably enjoy this book.

Now I will start off saying that this book was not nearly as crazy as the original story.  At least in this story you can keep everything straight…and I think that is because Wonderland is a real world in this story – rather than a make believe dream land. 

While I enjoyed the twist on all the characters, the story itself was a little bland.    It didn’t keep me as interested as I thought it would.  I think this story was stretched out to be longer, and that’s why it ended up being long.  It also jumped around a lot.  We got a lot of what happened in the future with certain side characters, and then it’d jump back to what is going on now. <spoiler> For instance, at the end of the story when Alyss sent the duplicate Alyss back to the real world and how she got married and had children, etc, and then it jumped back in to what was happening in Wonderland to the real Alyss.  It was just a little hard to follow sometimes. </spoiler>

It was also weird that so many sound effects were made by the reader on the audiobook.  I would have rather he just read the words rather than try to make the sounds.  That’s not something against this book itself, but something I didn’t like about reading the audiobook version.  But I did like his English accent and he was actually pretty good at different voices.  I usually knew who was talking.

I still enjoyed this book, but I don’t think I need to read any spoilers.  I don’t have a whole lot to say about this book.  It really was just meh to me.  There weren’t many things that stood out to me as great, but not many that stood out that I hated either.  I wish I could give this a more thorough review, but I just don’t have much to say.