Alice Through the Needle

I think I almost prefer it to the Lewis Carroll-written THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS if that isn't too sacrilegious. And oh, it could have been such an awful book. Alice falls through the eye of the needle while trying to get a piece of yarn in, while Dinah the cat bats the ball of yarn--and then far away, on the other side of the sky, Alice is falling the way that, later on in the story, it starts raining cats and dogs--literally. Adair slowly but surely builds a complicated edifice that the intelligent child will "get" sooner than even the smartest adult, and it all has to do with alphabetical order, and what could be "alphabetter" than that? New characters abound, and some old favorites like the Red and White Queens. Perhaps the poetry and songs in NEEDLE'S EYE are the slightest bit inferior to those that adorned the two original books--but if so that's my only qualm. Whether Alice is playing with the Siamese-twin cats, whose tails are joined so that they're never far away from each other, or whether she's encountering the Grampus, sort of a cross between a headmaster and a whale, she is always as endearing, obstinate, independent and delightful as she was in the 1860s. For Adair time has stood still and we are all on the eve of remarkable discoveries. Adair also wrote a lovely sequel to PETER PAN that should be on every child's bookshelf next to the original. If only he were to go to work on the Land of Oz! However avoid the new Agatha Christie "pastiche" he is responsible for. Wrong headed in every way (THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD).

How rare it is that someone can write in the style of another author and truly capture that author to the point that you beleive the work could have been original. This is one of those rare works. Puns abound (how about the Welsh rabbit?) and it follows so well that there's no doubt Alice is really on a further adventure.

Alice Through the Needle's Eye is a delightful sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. This is a romp through the alphabet, in the manner of the Looking Glass chess game,full of word-play fitting locales to the letters, as in the title, the Needle's "I" and complete with poetry that almost could have been from long-lost Carrollian manuscripts.