The Looking Glass Wars Review

Have you ever read a book that you really wanted to like and that even told a good story, but there was something about it that just.... sucked? I mean you try to ignore the problem(s) even though you noticed them early on, but they just keep coming back. A stupid name. A character with a corny speech impediment. Comma splices. Annoying series of sentence fragments.

I present to you The Looking Glass Wars by... ummm.... Frank Beddor. I'm about halfway through it, and I want to suggest to the author that he change his name to Frank Actuallykindaworse.

I say this because it is impossible not to compare him to Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), and I'll tell you why. The Looking Glass Wars is based on the presumption that Lewis Carroll totally screwed up the Alice story. The premise is that Wonderland is real (and kinda scary) and that Alice Liddell is actually Alyss Heart, heir to the Wonderland throne until her Aunt Redd killed her family and took over as the new evil Queen of Hearts. For those of you familiar with it, I secretly call this novel American McGee's Alice: The Book.

So you get it? A reimagining of a classic children's story. Fleshing out the world and making it deep, mature, and political. Gregory Maguire! Moving on...

Anybody who knows anything about me knows that I absolutely love the Alice books and have read them more times than you have. Usually such feelings about a work make people judge related and derivitive works more harshly because there is much to live up to. I'm the opposite and pretty much automatically like anything having to do with Alice (or Harry Potter, Buffy, and Matthew Rush for that matter). So I dove into The Looking Glass Wars with extremely open arms and minds. Mind. And I'm still totally into the book. The plot's a little two-dimensional, giving it a one dimension lead on the characters, but it's fine, I'm over it. It's still Wonderland, after all.

But there's just so many little things that piss me off along the way that I can't recommend this book to anyone with intelligence. First of all, Couldbe Beddor is not a writer. He's a professional skiier. In fact, if you check imdb.com, you'll find that he's also a stunt man. So he can't write... like at all. His style is impossible. To be perfectly honest, it reads a lot like my blog.... kinda off the cuff, a little cliche, and every now and then, you have to go back and reread a sentence a few times because the grammar and syntax are so confusing. And when I say "cliche", I mean horribly corny. Upon receiving news of her husband's murder, the current Queen of Wonderland exclaims "Oh, my sweet king!" C'mon, nobody says that. Barf me out, man!

Furthermore, he has no sense of children. Alyss is 7, right, and her best friend Dodge is 10. Whatever, I'll buy it. But in this one scene, Alyss is making him dance with her, and he's having what can only be described as perverted, lusty thoughts about her. It's totally disgusting. He wants to marry her so bad, and he's smelling her sweet perfume... he puts his hand on her waist.... he had never touched the princess in this way before. I already said "barf me out" so now I'm going to go with "Gag me with a spoon!" Ten year old boys, in my experience, do not even play with seven-year-old girls for fear of cooties and getting their asses kicked by the other boys on the schoolyard. This scene was out of hand.

Ugh, and one of the things have the stupidest names! Hatter Madigan? Fine. Wondertropolis? Please. Outerwildbeastia? Get away from me. And if I see one more reference to people eating "tarty tarts" I might kill myself.

It's stuff like this. I mean, the book is SO bad, but it's an actiony, engaging story nonetheless. I don't get it.

Oh, but check out the website. It's right here. The guy's got trailers and commercials and plans to make a movie series and a card game and I just wanna say "Dude, calm the fuck down!" Authors need to have humbler beginnings. His books were released in America like two seconds ago, and he's all what? Wanting to be the next J.K. Rowling? Be patient, man. (Although... I have to admit, it would probably make a kick-ass movie. Especially because we wouldn't have to suffer the guy's writing style.)

Wow, this is probably my longest entry ever, and it's on a book that none of you care about and I don't think you should read. But it's Alice-based, so I had to obsess. I'm going to finish it. Obviously. And then I'm going to read the second and third books in the trilogy when he finishes them. Obviously. And I'll do it wrapped in a blanket of disappointment. Don't be like me. Read something else.