Books inspired by Alice in Wonderland

Are you disappointed that Carroll only wrote two 'Alice' books? Keith Sheppard's daughter was. So he decided to write a third adventure, in Lewis Carroll's familiar style.

During the night, Alice's bed mysteriously turns into a boat, and she drifts off to Wonderland once more. She meets many characters, some new, some familiar, but they all want to play games with her. However, the rules in Wonderland are somewhat different than Alice is used to...

Although it lacks the deeper layers from the original stories, Sheppard's tale is charming and contains several great puns and jokes in Carrolian style. Some are based on Carroll's ("If you don't know where you are trying to get to, how do you know you haven't arrived"), some are brand new ("A lost memory can be very hard to find, because you can never remember where you put it").

The book is illustrated by Cynthia Brownell. Personally I'm not very fond of her illustrations, but that may be a matter of taste.

I definitely recommend this book to everyone who is longing to read another simple, yet amusing story about Alice and a strange journey through the Wonderland of games.

Automated Alice is written as a sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice books.

Instead of falling down a rabbit hole or going through a looking glass, in this book Alice travels through a grandfather clock to Manchester England in 1998. This Manchester however, is a world populated by half-humans who ride on mechanical horses and where computers are powered by termites called Computermites. Alice must figure out how to get back to her own time with the help of a parrot that speaks in riddles and an automated Alice with a termite brain.

Alice's adventures bear a lot of resemblance to the original stories. Noon tries to emulate Carroll's wordplay throughout the book, but I think he only partly succeeds in it. Sometimes it results in ingenious new puns that made me smile, but at other times they felt a little far-fetched and gave me the idea the author had trouble inventing an appropriate pun.

The book amused me at first, but when I was half way it was much more of the same thing. It started to bore me and I never actually finished the story.

This book is presented as a long lost story, recently discovered behind a shelf in Christ Church’s library. It is rumored that Lewis Carroll wrote it as a wedding gift to Alice Liddell, however, for some reason never presented it to her.

R.J. Carter (listed as the annotator and editor, but who is in fact the actual author) added annotations to the margins, trying to explain all the obscure references Carroll is supposed to have added to the story.

The illustrations are from Lucy Wright’s hand. I must say they are quite good, even though they aren’t really to my personal taste.

The book is about Alice, using her father’s telescope to watch the eclipse. Suddenly she finds herself shutting up like a telescope, and she ends up on the moon, where she meets several interesting characters, like the Man on the Moon, the Queen, and Hayah and Hattah.

The story by itself is nice, but lacks creativeness. Several characters from the previous books are recycled, and it contains only very few clever new puns in Carrollian style. Instead, often some lines from the other books are rephrased in a slightly different way. Carter does succeed in having Alice act in her familiar, unemotional but curious way.

Luckily, the annotations add a lot to the story. Just like in Martin Gardner’s ‘Annotated Alice’, they help us determine the date on which the story takes place, link the story to events in Carroll’s life, and explain the parodies on existing works. It is obvious that Carter put a lot of work into researching them. Some ‘hidden meanings’, however, are quite far-fetched, like the doublets, although I thought well of the anagrams.

It may be a good thing that ‘Carroll’ eventually decided not to give the book as a wedding gift to Alice. Although the author obviously went through a lot of trouble to recreate the layers of meaning found in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’, it just cannot rival with the originals. But then, which story can?

When her parents, the king and queen of Wonderland, are killed by her Aunt Redd, Alyss Heart escapes by jumping into the Pool of Tears. Her jump takes her to Victorian Oxford, where she emerges from a puddle, lives as a street urchin, and is eventually adopted by Reverend and Mrs. Liddell.

Unable to make anyone believe her fantastic story, she finally confides in Charles Dodgson, who says he will write a book about her. When she discovers that Alice's Adventures Underground is full of make-believe, and not her story or her real name, she sadly resigns herself to life as a Victorian girl of privilege.

Meanwhile, back in Wonderland, the Alyssians form a resistance movement and attempt to overthrow the despotic Redd. For years, Hatter Madigan searches the world for Alyss so she can return to Wonderland as Queen. In the end, the Alyssians prevail, but only after much graphic bloodshed and many brutal battles involving card soldiers who transform into warriors, chessmen, blades that whirl and slash, vicious Jabberwocks, and even carnivorous roses.

Opinions about this book differ. Some love it, but more people hate it because it is too violent for a Wonderland.

"Alice I Have Been" is a fictionalised 'biography', narrated by Alice Liddell Hargreaves. The story begins with the eighty-year old Alice coming to America to be feted as the little girl from Wonderland. Alice recalls her youthful years, her spending time with Charles Dodgson, and her relationships with Ruskin, Prince Leopold, and Reginal Heargraves. The story examines the changing relationship between the real Alice and the girl she was portrayed as in Lewis Carroll's story.
This 'autobiography' is fiction, but adds events to the facts we are familiar with.

Very amiable story by Doucette, who sent it to me for feedback, before it was published.

The book has some similarities with the popular DaVinci Code, as it is also based on true events and gives its own twist to existing opinions about those events. Only this story makes less use of codes.

The story contains many references to and quotes from the Alice books, which makes the story interesting to read for people who are familiar with the Alice stories.

The illustrations are of Doucette's own hand, and look great. The illustrations resemble spotlights, that have suddenly appeared, and enable us to see a fragment of what is happening in the story world. Somehow they remind me of the illustrations for Le Petit Prince.

1898. Holmes and Watson encounter American newspaper magnate, John Moxton, whose yellow press Clarion is beginning to dominate and undermine Victorian England. Public figures are humiliated then murdered.

Each incident has a parallel in Alice in Wonderland. And each time the Clarion is conveniently on hand. What is Moxton's master plan and can Homes and Waston unravel it in time? And what is the strange bond that links the detective to a man he has never met... or has he?

A collection of stories by various writers, among which Donya Currie Arias, Beth Bachmann, Bruce Bauman, Jeffrey M. Bockman, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and Ann Downer. Photos by Nancy Taylor.

It's Walt Disney meets H. G. Wells' Time Machine when Emma Thomas' best friend loses the silver dollar that Emma loaned her for a seventh grade school project.

Dana offer's her twelve-year-old friend a replica of a magic token once owned by Charles Dickens. Reluctantly taking it, Emma scoffs at the claims on the magic token package that the famous 19th century author used it to time travel for his book research.

During an argument with her younger brother, Emma accidentally wishes herself back to 1862 and joins Alice in Wonderland. Along their journey Emma breaks up the Caucus racers, acts as policewoman for a loud-mouthed Duchess and her pan-throwing cook, trades insults with the pipe-smoking Caterpillar and the grinning Cheshire Cat, disrupts the Queen of Heart's croquet match, stirs the Mad Hatter's tea party into an even madder, madcap, madhouse, and plays defense attorney to try to stop the Queen of Hearts from chopping off Alice's head.

Having lost the magic token somewhere in Wonderland, can Emma escape, or is she trapped in Alice's mad, mad, mad, upside-down world forever?

Roiphe's tale is a fictional exploration of Dodgson's life, which makes it a novel, not a book about real events. However, a thorough research has preceded her writing and the book also contains photographs that Dodgson took of Alice.

The story deals with the relation between Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson. Was there some kind of sexual attraction or not?

In Fantastic Alice, 17 authors rework material by Lewis Carroll; from Alice's adventures in the underground railroad to her encounters with the inner rabbit, and several stories that bring Carrollian characters to the real world.

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This book is a thriller, and takes place during one single night. The narrator is a 53-year-old guy named Doc Stoeger, editor of a small-city newspaper, and a real fan of Lewis Carroll's works. Stoeger complains that nothing ever happens in his little town, giving him material to fill his weekly newpaper.

That is, until that night. The whole town seems to go crazy and Stoeger is set into play by an extremely intelligent criminal. He sets Stoeger up to take the fall for two murders and plays him like a chess piece.

The Lewis Carroll references become very important to the storyline and are scattered liberally throughout the book.

This book was first published in 1895, thirty years after the initial publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Richards' book, a girl called Alice Lee makes her way to Wonderland.
The book is illustrated in the style of John Tenniel by the author's daughter.

The author of this book, Mr. Sweeney, pretends that it is a sequel to the Alice books from Lewis Carroll's own hand, discovered in his notes.
The story deals among others with adult themes of death and it contains a number of references to Dante’s Divine Comedy. This edition presents the full text, restored and annotated, with additional material that presents the work in the context of the time and culture it was written in.

After the publication of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, a lot of imitations, revisions, and parodies of Carroll's fantasies for children were produced. In this anthology, Carolyn Sigler gathers twenty of the most interesting and original of these responses to the Alice books, many of them long out of print.

Alternately satiric, enchanting, experimental, and subversive, these Alice-inspired works reveal how variously Carroll's books were read, re-inscribed, and resisted in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Talasek's Alice is studying towards her MBA degree at Ivy League University. One day, while preparing herself for her final exams, she falls asleep. In her dream, Alice is thrusted into the world of corporate America.

We follow Alice during her first chaotic day of work at the company Wonderland, Inc., when she goes off to explore corporate programs, policies, and self-aggrandizing executives, manifested as a menagerie of familiar characters from the original Alice in Wonderland story.