Trigger warnings: drug use, psychotic mental illness, attempted rape, transphobia but mainly fetishisation of trans people, sex scenes, attempted murder, suicide mentions, self-harm mentions.
Okay, last book to be reviewed, most recently published, and read. I pre-ordered this book in lockdown so I could get a signed Waterstones copy and finished it in a matter of days. Good book! (despite the trigger warning list, I promise it’s all dealt with well)
Wonderland is a re-telling of Alice in Wonderland, featuring Alice – a transgender pansexual* main character who is – as far as I can tell being non-binary – accurate to the trans experience at 16*. To be fair the author, Juno Dawson is a trans author and so I would hope her trans characters would be accurate. The line about needing her hair to be dyed blue or else how will anyone know she’s trans is just perfect (although the character is going stealth at the time that part occurred).
Alongside Alice is the rest of the cast from the original book, but none of them are explicitly labelled as the Wonderland characters they are meant to be, making it kind of fun and exciting to find the corresponding characters and bits of plot without them being obviously highlighted to you. Or idk, maybe I’m just sad.
One of the parts that will make this book a harder sell to the audience of this blog – queer and mostly northern young adults who want to eat the rich – is that all the characters are part of London’s rich kids and is set in the rich kids drug scene. I personally didn’t feel that aspect to be too bad and the story only works cause they are rich private school kids who can have massive parties. Additionally, Alice is only a rich teen due to her mother being a highly successful author (if you think of the rags to riches story behind Queen TERF, like that but with a crime series and the author is nice).
There are several mystery plots going on in the book, the main one being what happened to Bunny but also what happened to Antonella Hemmings emerges as a second plot point as other characters discuss the events that lead to her death and the events that occurred afterwards.
This book is set in the same universe as two other books by Juno Dawson, with overlapping characters (the only other one I’ve read is Clean, which has Antonella Hemmings as another side character and Lexi Volkov, who is briefly mentioned in Wonderland, as a lead. The other book in the three is Meat Market which I don’t currently own on the basis of owning enough books that need reading first.
By Taylor Adams
Comments