Alice isn’t your grandmother’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Hell, I don’t even know if it’s my version of it either. It’s dark, disturbing, both a retelling and a continuation of the classic, and I’m issuing all the trigger warnings. The book is fraught with violence, including both physical and sexual violence against women. So if those things are difficult for you to read about, especially in relation to a much-loved story from your childhood, I would definitely caution you against reading this.

But if dark and disturbing is your jam, then have at it.

Following her trip “down the rabbit hole,” Alice returns two weeks later, bloodied and disfigured. Her face has been flayed open and dried blood is caked along the inside of her thighs. We all know what this means. The only words she can seem to say are “the rabbit,” causing her family to send her to an asylum in the Old City where she spends the next decade. See, the Old City is where all the criminals and filth reside. The New City is where Alice used to live with her well-to-do family. Nothing good comes from the Old City, especially not treatment for mental health.

While imprisoned, she makes friends with the patient next to her as they communicate through a small hole in the wall. He’s the Mad Hatcher (oddly enough, he’s the only Alice character that gets a new name – Hatcher instead of Hatter). He was found surrounded by several bloodied bodies, including that of his own wife, with an axe in his hand. Imprisoned in this same hospital is the Jabberwock, a fearsome creature who is closely linked to the Hatcher, sending Hatch into a trance whenever he is near.

One night, the hospital catches fire and Hatch and Alice escape. Both cannot remember their life before the hospital, only bits and pieces. So the two escape into the streets of the Old City or else risk being burned alive. The Jabberwock is freed as the hospital burns down, leaving Hatch and Alice to try and figure out their past lives and how to return the Jabberwock to his prison with – you guessed it – the Vorpal sword.

The Old City is ruled by five bosses. The Walrus. The Carpenter. Cheshire. The Caterpillar. The Rabbit. All of them are awful individuals and many of them deal in the trafficking, abuse, and mutilation of women.

As Hatch and Alice hunt for the sword, their journey takes them into the territories of all five. Memories come back in flashes and it becomes apparent that the Rabbit is the one responsible for Alice’s rape and torment. Her face is permanently scarred from her ordeal, making it so she can never hide from him. The Rabbit knows she’ll come back because, after all, he has the sword she seeks.

It’s all very twisted and at first, I struggled with whether or not I enjoyed it. I was riveted to every word, but I found it jarring. I connected a lot with the story of Alice as a child. My mom still had her copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass from the seventies and, if I wasn’t such a wimp, I’d get a full sleeve tattoo of illustrations from those books.

But I love a good story of revenge. And I enjoyed the way Christina Henry balanced magic and violence and turned me against these familiar characters and the ideas I held of them from the children’s story. Some of the connections are obvious, like the recurring characters, but others are subtler.

She must start believing in impossible things, for impossible things kept appearing right before her eyes.

As soon as I read that, I instantly recalled the quote from the original:

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Despite all the violence, there’s a gentle growth in Alice as she adapts to the world outside the hospital. She was committed to the hospital at sixteen. Nearly half of her life was spent in those walls, somewhat sheltered from the world, and especially from emotions and experiences that come with adolescence. It’s heartbreaking.

I’ve never been a woman, she thought. She didn’t mean it like a woman who is a wife and performs wifely duties (like the ones the butterfly girls offered the men who entered the club), but a woman who sat in adult company, who saw the world through an adult’s eyes. Her body had grown older but her mind was still trapped at sixteen, still unsure of how to act and how to be.

The majority of the book is spent searching for a way to beat the Jabberwock and, as Alice regains her memories, attaining revenge against The Rabbit is added to her to-do list. After all, there’s no way to avoid a confrontation between the two characters. I looked forward to their meeting, to having Alice destroy the man who destroyed her life. But what happens is far from satisfying, much like the climax of the book between Hatch, Alice, and the Jabberwock. Those last few pages where the final showdowns are supposed to happen deflated the rest of the story. They were anticlimactic and lacking in the previous momentum leading up to it. I wasn’t satisfied by Alice’s “revenge,” if it could even be called that.

I’m even pretty sure I heard a sad trombone play in the back of my head.

I enjoyed Alice, even though my inner nine-year-old Amanda was very disturbed and may never think of the Rabbit in a waistcoat and pocket watch again. But if you’re expecting a big payoff, you aren’t going to find it at the end. Sorry to say. There will also be a second book released sometime next year titled The Red Queen, though I’ve found little on it just yet. There are still characters left to introduce and I’ll probably pick it up, just to see what Henry does with them.