Tag Archives: Alice in Wonderland

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WONDERful

Wonderful

A review of Cait Gordon’s A Night at The Rabbit Hole in Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland edited by Colleen Anderson (Exile, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Alice in Wonderland is a story that plays with identity, disrupting the power that normativity has on our society. Cait Gordon has tapped into that power that Wonderland has to resist normativity and creates a GenderQueer Alice who has just come out and taken on their new name and pronouns. It is refreshing to read a story featuring a GenderQueer character that is not about the struggles of occupying their identity. In A Night at The Rabbit Hole, Alice is instantly accepted for their gender and people don’t slip up and refer to them as anything other than “them” after one quick correction.

Gordon uses the Alice in Wonderland text for its power to disrupt power structures that erase identity possibilities and instead writes a story filled with potential and possibility.

A Night at the Rabbit Hole is a tale about a meeting in a dance club where Alice is given a pill that transforms their perspective and gives them an expanded view of the world around them, allowing them to see through human disguises to the creatures beneath. Gordon plays with the question of what could alter someone’s perspective like the “drink me” potion and mushroom that Alice takes in Carroll’s story and ultimately comes up with the connection to club drugs. After Alice took their pill (here called a “tart”), I have to admit that the Jefferson Airplane song White Rabbit was running through my head as Alice’s perspectives were warped, and I think that Gordon intended to plant this trippy tune in the minds of her readers.

Cait Gordon’s characteristic playfulness comes through in this tale of altered reality and questioned norms and she invites readers to chuckle at clever witticisms at the same time as they speculate about possibilities beyond the simple world that they live in. This is a story that empowers at the same time as it entertains

To discover more about Alice Unbound, go to http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/alice-unbound-beyond-wonderland/

To find out more about Cait Gordon, visit her website at https://caitgordon.com

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A War Across the Glass

A War Across The Glass

A review of Patrick Bollivar’s “Operation: Looking Glass” in Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland Edited by Colleen Anderson (Exile 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

It turns out Wonderland isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Patrick Bollivar’s “Operation: Looking Glass” explores a group of people who are in a battle with Wonderland to get their sister back. The Wonderland that Bollivar envisions is one that is at war with the human world and at war with itself. It is suffused with an aether, an air that transforms people and animals who cross through the looking glass into this strange world.

Bollivar imagines the potential for Wonderland to have a contagious effect but unites this contagious transformation with a specific location – Wonderland. The contagious effect varies, but it changes people’s personalities and ideologies and it changes animals into hybridized figures with human and animal characteristics. This Wonderland has been at war with itself, conflicted both in terms of its inherent contradictions but also literally engaged in battle.

Bollivar creates a steampunkesque diving story, but this particular group of adventurers are diving into another world… though one that they need as much protection from as they would at the bottom of the ocean.

Like many of the authors in Alice Unbound, Bollivar unites aspects of Lewis Carroll’s life with the world that he created when he wrote Wonderland, and this particular tale involves the Liddell children, who served as inspirations for Carroll’s writing. The characters in Bollivar’s tale call Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland a propagandist text, ignoring the real horrors of Wonderland.

This is a highly exciting steampunk story that provides a contrast between the rational world and the world of dangerous whimsy that lay on the other side of a simple sheet of glass.

To find out more about Alice Unbound, visit Exile’s website at http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/alice-unbound-beyond-wonderland/

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Border Walls and Barriers

Border Walls and Barriers

A review of Rich Larson’s “Porque El Girasol se Llama El Girasol” in Shades Within Us: Tales of Migration and Fractured Borders Edited by Lucas Law and Susan Forest (Laksa Media Group, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

With “Porque El Girasol se Llama El Girasol”, Rich Larson tells a significant tale for a post-Trump world. Larson’s story is about Latinx people in a post-wall America who need to find a method of passing through a militarized border with a massive wall. Those who are caught in American territory are put to work building the wall further, often dying from unsanitary conditions, and those who are caught in the no man’s land around the wall are allowed to be butchered without remorse.

Larson tells his tale through the perspective of Girasol, a little girl who is trying to escape America with her mother. Although a small child, she is aware of the realities of being captured and killed in the process of escaping, illustrating the loss of childhood that many children have to experience when they are subject to political violence by oppressive regimes.

They are escorted through the wall by a man who functions as a coyote (a person who brings people across borders), but this coyote is quite different from others because he needs to take his passengers through a quantum level of reality in order to get them safely through the highly protected wall. He is called the Cheshire Man, evoking the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland for his ability to disappear and go where others cannot go.

“Porque El Girasol se Llama El Girasol” is a tale of loss, family sacrifice, and political violence, reminding readers of the violence that can occur in a political regime that casts certain people as unwanted and that justifies violence against them.

To discover more about Shades Within Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/shades-within-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause/

To find out more about Rich Larson, visit https://www.patreon.com/richlarson