After Alice by Gregory Maguire - TLC Book Tour

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (July 5, 2016)

From the multi-million-copy bestselling author of Wicked comes a magical new twist on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Lewis’s Carroll’s beloved classic.

When Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?

In this brilliant work of fiction, Gregory Maguire turns his dazzling imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings—and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend of Alice’s mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit her friend, but arrives a moment too late—and tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. If Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. Either way, everything that happens next is “After Alice.”

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About Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror; and the Wicked Years, a series that includesWicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Now a beloved classic, Wicked is the basis for a blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Find out more about Maguire at his website and follow him on Facebook.

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My Thoughts:

When I first read Alice in Wonderland, I remember being so captivated by the story and never wanting it to end.  I spent months, no, years, wondering what other adventures Alice could have gotten into and what would happen if other characters were to fall in the same hole.

I had NO clue that decades later, I would be reading a book that would answer those questions for me.

Here is After Alice, the story of Ada who is Alice's friend and who also falls down the rabbit hole, but after Alice.  By doing so, she begins her very own adventure.

But not only do we get Ada's side of the story, we also get to experience what the people left behind in Oxford, felt and did with the disappearance of the two girls.

It was such a delightful book to read, it made me want to go back and read Alice's story all over again.  Throw in a Victorian Era setting with all of it's manners, and customs and I was just in absolute book heaven.

I can't describe how much I enjoyed this book and it's definitely made me want to read more by Gregory Maguire :)