Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Author: Lewis Carroll

One-sentence summary: A little girl named Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole and enters a world in which nothing is as it seems and absolutely nothing makes sense.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 6

Our favorite thing about it: There are some very witty plays on words in this book and many parts are very fun fantasies.

Our least favorite thing about it: The parts that weren’t witty or fantastical were just plain weird. So weird that we didn’t much care for them!

Main Topics of Discussion: Fantasy, Childhood, Dreams, Culture differences of fantasies, how the book was written, strangeness

Our favorite quote: “And the moral of that is – Be what you would seem to be – or if you’d like it put more simply – Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

Notes: We talked a little bit about how this book differed from the Disney movie that we love. There are several parts that are missing in the movie and some in the movie that are from the sequel to this book, Through the Looking Glass. One part of this book in particular struck us all as very strange and almost disturbing: the house with the Duchess and the pig. The conversation at the Mad Hatters table was frustrating but very nearly matched the Disney representation. Some of the plays on words that we enjoyed involved using a word with a double meaning. Those little nuggets of wit were fun. We also enjoyed some of the more clever parts of the story like the deck of cards as the Queen of Hearts’ guards as well as the croquet game with flamingoes and hedgehogs. Alice seemed to be very well portrayed as a little girl. In fact, her constant interrupting and question-asking is very characteristic of a little child. We were all glad that we’d read this classic but agreed that we probably wouldn’t read it again although it was a very fast read.

Memorable Meeting Moments: This meeting was just chock full of memorable moments. We started out at Brooklyn’s Pizza and then went to Dara’s house for hot chocolate and smores. We had a super-fun game of Jeopardy again, courtesy of Becky that summarized our year of meeting and reading. We exchanged gifts and had a dirty Santa book swap. Pictures to follow in the next post!