The big twist at the end changed so many balances about the story. It may threaten the sacred bond between Alice and Hatchet. But I actually loved the unexpected turn even though the story’s direction will head us a very dark place. I was not psyched about separating Alice & Hatcher. They have such a great connection together. But the longer they were apart, the more necessary it felt. Alice has never been alone. She went straight from home, to The Rabbit, to the mental hospital, to Hatcher's side. Now alone in the woods, surrounded by unimaginable dangers, on her way to face a mad queen, she is forced to face herself. She has only herself to count on. That and her trusty knife. The world created here is not our world and it is not Wonderland. It's a horor-fantasy style setting in a fictional place called the Old City. 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. I actually had to push myself to finish this book. I hate saying that. I really wanted to love it. Because I swore, and still do, by Alice (the first book). On the day that Cristoffel van den Berg was found in the woods without his head, Sander and I were playing Sleepy Hollow Boys by the creek. This was a game that we played often. It would have been better if there were a large group but no one ever wanted to play with us.

An avid reader, Christina lives with her husband s well as son in Chicago. She enjoys novels and books of similar categories, including zombies and samurai. She is also very keen on long distance running, which is an activity she enjoys on a regular basis, when not writing up her many novels, of course! This passage summed up the book for me: "This is really all very strange," Alice murmured. "One of the strangest things I've seen, and I have seen lots that is strange. More than my fair share, as a matter of fact." Twenty years after those storied events, the village is a quiet place. Fourteen-year-old Ben loves to play “Sleepy Hollow boys,” reenacting the events Brom once lived through. But then Ben and a friend stumble across the headless body of a child in the woods near the village, and the sinister discovery makes Ben question everything the adults in Sleepy Hollow have ever said.

Hm, this was ok. It was enjoyable, I wasn’t bored. But I just couldn’t see enough of a comparison with the original Alice duology by Lewis Carroll to warrant calling this a retelling. There are so many new parts introduced which, don’t get me wrong, they do make it interesting (giants, an evil goblin, a village under the White Queen’s control, Hatcher being turned into a wolf etc.) but none of this stuff is from the original story. There’s no tweedle dee and tweedle dum, no talking flowers I’m still not sure if the rabbit from book 1 is supposed to be the White Rabbit or the March Hare?!?

In other news, the release date for THE GHOST TREE has been moved up to September 8, 2020. I’m so excited for all of you to read this book, which is very close to my heart. More information about THE GHOST TREE can be found here. Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive… I pressed my lips together and didn’t respond, which was what I always did when Sander was right about something. Christina Henry". Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . Retrieved 2020-08-22. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status ( link)Sander obviously hadn’t heard them yet, for he was still galloping toward me, waving his arms before him and making his bad pig noises. Sander ran toward me, laughing as loud as he could. It was all right but he didn’t really sound like my opa. Nobody sounded like Brom, if truth be told. Brom’s laugh was a rumble of thunder that rolled closer and closer until it broke over you. There were nods all around the circle from everyone except Brom, who scrubbed his face with his hands, a gesture that meant he was irritated, and doubly irritated on top of it because he wasn’t allowed to express that feeling. The world gobbles us and chews us and swallows us…I think happy endings must be accidents…But we hope for them all the same.”

The world gobbles us and chews us and swallows us," Hatcher said, in that uncanny way he had of reading her thoughts. "I think happy endings must be accidents." She was also an only child, which meant her parents didn’t have to worry about having money for the next kid’s stuff. Lauren had heard her mother sighing many times that the trouble with having a girl and then a boy was that you couldn’t reuse anything. Elizabeth didn’t know why she was now thinking of That Day as she tripped down the stairs in her lovely dress. That Day had been strange and confusing, all the adults in the house speaking in hushed voices. Because,” I said, impatiently waving at Sander to follow my lead. “If they see us they might tell us off for being in the woods. You know most of the villagers think the woods are haunted.”I thought you were going to watch Halloween with me,” Miranda said. “It’s the perfect night for it!” This is one of the best, darkest and most disturbing retellings I have ever read. 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. If you like your retellings to stay close to the original, then don't waste your time with Alice - it is very different.

Elizabeth climbed into her seat and laid her napkin on her lap as she was supposed to do and waited for Hobson to serve. But in spite of this story been gloom, the mood of the dark fantasy that was constantly present in the previous book, did not stay in this one. We don't have as many scary moments as we had before, and Alice's adventures are simply adventures, not something nightmarish. And, alas, this is the main flaw of this story; I found myself more than once bored by Alice and her getting from point A to point B without anything extraordinary happening on her way. Yes, there were curious moments, but that's it: they were just curious and nothing more.

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Some people didn’t like the woods near Smiths Hollow. Well, if Lauren was honest, almost everyone didn’t like the woods. She’d heard more than one person say they were “spooky” and “uncanny” and “scary,” but Lauren didn’t think so. If Mama had said this the way that she usually said it Elizabeth would have wriggled with pride but it didn’t sound the way Mama usually said it. It was stiff and hard and Mama didn’t mean it. Elizabeth could tell.