Forever Lost in Literature: alice in wonderland

Welcome to The Friday Face-Off, a weekly meme here at Books by Proxy. Join us every Friday as we pit cover against cover, and publisher against publisher, to find the best artwork in our literary universe. You can find a list of upcoming topics at Lynn's Books.

This week's topic is:
“As full of spirit as the month of May” – A cover featuring a festival/party/celebration

This week's topic was much more difficult than anticipated. There simply don't seem to be many books that depict celebrations on the cover, at least not in the ones I've read! In the end, I decided to fall back on a classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll--and also one of my all-time favorites. I figured this would be a good book for this topic since I know I've seen plenty of covers that depict the infamous Mad Tea Party. There are seeming endless covers for this book--and some extraordinarily odd ones that I love--and I definitely didn't get even close to looking at all of them, but here are a few!

2009 AD Classic || 1972 Polish || 2010 Italian

2009 Oxford Children's || 2011 Broadview Press || 2009 Spanish

2012 Romanian || 2012 Spanish || 2011 Portuguese

My choices:

This is a hard decision! I will admit that none of the covers on this list include any of my absolute favorites, but there are definitely still some gems. I'm not entirely sure what the thought process was behind the Broadview Press edition--take some real like photographs of people dressed up as the characters? That sounds like it has the potential to get a bit...odd. The Romanian one has almost too much going on and also has a really distinct atmosphere from the rest. In the end, I went with the AD Classic edition because I love the classic artwork style and how the title is designed and the Portuguese edition because I just love the art style and colors!

Alice no PaÃƒÂs das Maravilhas (Alice #1)

Which covers do you like best?

Child of Nod by C.W. Snyder. Curiosity Quills Press, 2017. Ebook. 274 pages.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl who was dead."

That opening line had me hooked immediately on this book and is pretty much what made me know that I wanted to read it.

Child of Nod turned out to be completely unexpected from what I thought this book might be. This book is pitched as darker take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which Alice ends up in Nod, a corrupted fairy tale land on the other side of death. I knew that this would be a darker story, which is what drew me to it initially, but I had no idea just how dark and gory it would be or what exactly it would be like. This is hard book to even describe and rate because it just felt so different from most books. It's definitely one that I plan on revisiting

Going into this book, I wasn't really sure what age-range it was being marketed towards, but I assumed it was possibly young adult, although the cover could have been anything from middle grade to adult. I have to say that this is definitely not written for kids and leans heavily toward the adult side, which was perfectly fine with me (I'm always ready for more Alice retellings at any age range). It's definitely dark and also rather creepy, so if that's not your thing then this book might not be for you.

This is a very atmospheric book that focuses a lot on descriptions, images, and emotions. There's not a large amount of action, but the narrative itself is still surprisingly gripping. That being said, there is still plenty of plot development and this book was never boring. Child of Nod a slow-paced book that seems to focus more on development of the characters themselves than it does on large events.

Alice herself was a particularly intriguing character. The weird thing about this Alice is that about halfway through I realized that we, the readers, never really get any backstory about her life because she can't remember her past. It's not often that I read books from the perspective of someone who we don't really know much about, and I was also surprised that it didn't really bother me at all. I enjoyed getting to know Alice based on her present circumstances and how she reacted to things as they happened to her. Alice is sweet, but there's much more to her than that; she's exceptionally curious and eager to find out exactly what she's doing in Nod.

There are a couple of other characters that this narrative focuses on that were extremely interesting figures to follow. I did find myself slightly confused at times when trying to remember the identities of various characters and occasionally forgot who was who. This might not have been a problem if I had been able to easily check back to figure out who was who, but since it was on my Kindle I couldn't do that easily so I just kept reading until I got the hang of things. I still really enjoyed reading about the backstories on these characters, and it's within these backstories where some of the darker and more horror-esque moments occurred most often.

Snyder's prose is beautiful and is able to convey so much passion in such a short amount of time. Books that focus heavily on descriptions and journeys can sometimes be hard to get into, but I found myself riveted by Snyder's words throughout the entire story, something that proves to me that author knows how to write and craft an intricate, captivating story.

Child of Nod is a book that I still need to think about and consider the themes and what this book was meant to be about. I also think that this is one of those books that I would prefer reading as a physical book because I kept wanting to go back and check thing or just reread certain parts, in addition to the fact that I personally find atmospheric and description-heavy books are just easier for me to read. Regardless, Child of Nod will definitely make you think and it is one that I do recommend.

Overall, I've given Child of Nod four stars!

Buy the book: Amazon | Book Depository

*I received a copy of Child of Nod courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This has no effect on my rating.*

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