Wendy already mentioned this, but there is a lot of rape in this book. I also need to offer a huge trigger warning. As the girl flexed her shoulders, the wings would beat.” The beautiful butterfly wings were neatly sewn into the exposed muscle. The girl’s back had been cut from the top of her shoulder to the bottom of her rib cage on both sides of her spine. “The wings were not attached to her shoulders by straps.

Take this quote about a girl who has been 'bought', tortured, and displayed for amusement: If you are disturbed by Brom's The Child Thief or Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, then you will not like this book. I don't want to sugar coat it in the slightest - this book is an adult, gory and sometimes upsetting fairytale. These names may be familiar, but favourite characters become terrifyingly monstrous in the author's hands. And somewhere in the darkness of this city fuelled by pain and misery, there lies the truth about Alice's forgotten past. To find it, Alice and Hatcher are forced deep into the bowels of the Old City, a place run by overlords - the Walrus, the Carpenter, the Caterpillar and Cheshire. And then one night a fire at the hospital sets them both free, but their suffering is far from over.Īfter escaping, they see a shadow of a monster watching them and somehow Hatcher knows what it means: the Jabberwock is free. Her only friend is Hatcher - the man who talks to her from the next cell and also remembers very little of his life before. Ever since Alice returned to her parents after going missing as a child, with blood running down her legs, missing memories, and strange inexplicable abilities, she has been deemed mad. It's a horor-fantasy style setting in a fictional place called the Old City. The world created here is not our world and it is not Wonderland. If you like your retellings to stay close to the original, then don't waste your time with Alice - it is very different.

The author gets extremely creative with this world, weaving in characters we recognize from the original Alice in Wonderland but telling a very different kind of story. This is one of the best, darkest and most disturbing retellings I have ever read. Blood on her hands and under her feet, blood in her mouth and pouring from her eyes.

Alice christina henry series