After Alice

Alice doesn't live here anymore-and Maguire has great fun upending the furniture to find out where she's gone. Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland... A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children's classic, retrofitted for grown-ups-and a lot of fun Kirkus (starred review) Thoughtful and disconcertingly memorable... This is a feast for the mind, and readers will ruminate on it long after turning the last page Publishers Weekly (starred review) Maguire effortlessly leaps between the absurd illusions of Wonderland and the building suspense of the search for the children in antique Oxford... [He] closes in on some big, haunting ideas himself, about the loss of loved ones and religious faith, about cultural and romantic subjugations, and about the evolutionary value of imagination... [A] harvest of delightfully stated observations, [confronting] weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language. [Maguire's] playful vocabulary may be -Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python, with a fine, unforced sense of play... his erudition is a joy, his sense of fun infectious New York Times Book Review Maguire conjures up a vision of Victorian England that ranges across its stuffiness, its snobbery and its cruelties SFX Magazine