Mount Toberead 8: Splintered, Unhinged, Ensnared, Untamed and Roseblood by A. G. Howard

As you can see by the title and the covers above I went on a bit of a binge when I got to H.

I also probably cheated a bit. The first 3 of the books were already on the shelves, but for completeness sake I bought the 4th (which is a book of short stories set in the same world and featuring the characters from the Splintered series) and the 5th (an entirely new story that I hope for the author's sake and her fans, is a standalone).

They were my wife's selection (and I think she's read at least the first 2 of the Splintered series), and largely chosen on the strength of the covers, and they are absolutely gorgeous.

The Splintered series is an entry into the various Wonderland related works. Central character Alyssa Gardner is a descendant of Alice Liddell (the girl who Lewis Carroll based Alice on) and as such has very vivid dreams set in Wonderland and also hears bugs speak to her. Alyssa lives in the town of Pleasance in Texas (Texas is also where the author lives, and the town name is a bit of an Easter egg for anyone who knows a little bit about the source material, Alice Liddell's middle name was Pleasance), and her mother is institutionalised for attempting to harm her daughter (this is a recurring theme in Howard's books, the lead character of Roseblood was also a survivor of attempted harm by a family member, in that case it was her grandmother). Alice's  female descendants all seem to suffer mentally because of their origins. Alyssa also claims that Alice suffered from mental illness towards the end of her life (I can't find anything to suggest that this was in fact the case) and was treated with electroshock therapy, using electric eels (again I can't find anything that says Alice Liddell, or Hargreaves as her married name, was ever given electroshock therapy, or that it was ever administered using electric eels to provide the current). I can't work out if the author actually thought this was real or deliberately played with history to have fun with her readers, maybe it was a way of illustrating Alyssa's state of mind, but I'm not convinced that was the case.

Eventually Alyssa does find her way to Wonderland and is accompanied by hunky bad boy Jeb Holt (Howard has a thing for bad boys, there are 2 of them in the Splintered series and 1 in Roseblood). They meet up with Morpheus (the 3rd point of the love triangle) and set about to try and fix Wonderland and in the process help Alyssa's life in our world.

I have to speak about Morpheus here. Plenty of the characters are altered versions of the ones seen in Lewis Carroll's original, heavily influenced by Tim Burton's take, but Morpheus is probably the most changed. He's actually the hookah smoking caterpillar, although metamorphosed into a moth. He is weirdly enough a good deal younger than he was as a caterpillar and now speaks with a Cockney accent. I've never seen any other work that tried to make a romantic connection between Alice and the caterpillar, but Splintered does it. He's actually not just interested in Alyssa, but anyone from her family line, it's just that Alyssa is the youngest and he believes he can keep her that way. That concept and the entire character are actually rather creepy, and I still don't understand why the author or the main character was attracted to him on any level.

Each book in the trilogy follows a different character's journey. Splintered is Alyssa's, Unhinged is Morpheus' and Ensnared is Jeb's. The ending book saw Alyssa faced with the choice of living out her days in the real world with Jeb or staying forever young in Wonderland with Morpheus. The author worked it so that Alyssa got to eat her cake and have it too. I felt rather ripped off by that and think that the readers were shortchanged.

Howard has strengths and weaknesses as an author. For me the weaknesses outnumbered the strengths. She writes fairly strong characters, although she can only write 3 types of characters. Replace Morpheus with Etalon in Roseblood and no one would notice the difference, Rune from Roseblood is basically a dark haired Alyssa and when she write Alyssa's mother Alison as a young teen in Untamed, if she hadn't occasionally mentioned the name Alison I would have been convinced that I was reading about Alyssa. I must admit I did kind of like Jeb, except for when he went all alpha male in the guise of doing right by Alyssa.

Her weaknesses as an author are many. Firstly there's the bad boy obsession. Then there's her taking liberties with actual history to suit her story (she seems to subscribe to a theory that The Phantom of the Opera was in fact some sort of psychic vampire, she also seems to think that The Phantom of the Opera was a factual recounting of events, and not a fiction). There are a lot of very elaborate descriptions of clothes that simply aren't required. No one seems to own a couch or a sofa, they all have chaise lounges. She uses a lot of $5 words when a $2 word would do just fine and probably make her point more clearly.

So why did I read 5 books? That's one of Howard's strengths. She does weave a clever and involving enough story that the reader wants to read to the end and find out what happens, even if she does mess it up by giving her work too happy an ending.

I will mention that the only reason I got through Roseblood was sheer bloodymindedness.

The Splintered trilogy and the associated book of short stories (Untamed) have their moments and are harmless enough pieces of YA fantasy romantic fluff. Roseblood is something else altogether, the only good thing about that book is the cover (and that wasn't drawn by the author). The best review I can give it is: The Phantom of the Opera meets Twilight.

Now that I've managed to climb out of the worlds of A. G. Howard with all my brain cells intact, I'll see what I can find with an I author.

Alice in Wonderland 1951

Personal Overview: Alice in Wonderland was one of the first Disney films I can remember being released to video and that was how I first saw it. By that stage I’d already read and reread Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, so was very familiar with the source material.

I personally thought Disney did an excellent job of translating it. He combined the two books and cut out some things that just didn’t work. Admittedly he made Alice a blonde when I think she’s described as being dark haired in the books, or is portrayed that was in Tenniel’s iconic illustrations. While I like Tenniel I’ve always seen Alice as blonde in my head, so I liked that change. I also think Disney’s White Rabbit is perfect.

It’s a fairly short film and it moves at a cracking pace. Kathryn Beaumont (who also voiced Wendy Darling in Peter Pan) did a fantastic job with Alice. Her voice just sounds right.

Hero/es: again the title gives it to us, that’s Alice. I liked Disney’s Alice, but then again I also like the Alice from the books and while Disney took liberties with the story he stayed true to the character of Alice from the books. She is classic TSTL (too stupid to live) with her impulsiveness or maybe it’s that she’s been conditioned to do what she’s told, so if a cake has ‘eat me’ written on it, she does so without question. She’s polite to a fault, but can break that when she feels she has to like getting away from Tweedledum and Tweedledee when after telling her the story of The Walrus and the Carpenter they get set to launch into You Are Old Father William, and she does lose her temper with the Red Queen, but then again as the Queen is threatening to cut her head off at the time that can be excused.

Villain/s: it could be argued that the Cheshire Cat is actually a villain. He seems to work to his own agenda. That habit of just appearing and reciting snatches of Jabberwocky is unsettling and creepy and every bit of advice he gives to Alice gets her in deeper trouble, however despite that Alice seems to like him. Maybe she’s just a cat person. Maybe at heart Dinah really wants to be a Cheshire Cat. Arguments about the Cat aside the accepted villain of this is the Red Queen. She’s not a particularly competent villain or even that scary, her over the topness kind of prevents that, but she is psychotic and has definite anger management issues, fortunately she’s mostly bluster and as her guards are really just a pack of cards they’re easy to escape from.

Cuteness Factor: it’s kind of hard to say with this one. Plenty of things are cute. The oysters, but as the Walrus eats them all they don’t last and meet a pretty messy end. The flowers started off cute, but became quite nasty when they realized Alice wasn’t a plant, and in fact insulted her by referring to her as a weed. Probably the cutest thing is the dormouse, although the hedgehogs that the Red Queen uses as croquet balls also rate high on the cuteometer.

Animation: I see Alice as a bit of a triumph for animation. The whole thing was written to be animated. It works so well as a cartoon. Disney was allowed to let his animation department have their head, go nuts with the colours and the ideas and they did just that. This time they were able to do it for an entire film, not just the odd sequence. I don’t think it was matched until they tried to match their art with Robin Wiliams largely adlibbed script at the Genie in Aladdin. Even with our improved technology Tim Burton wasn’t able to translate the story particularly well as a live action version a few years ago. Not even Johnny Depp saved it for mine.

Final Words: it doesn’t get a lot of kudos and it performed disappointingly at the box office. Not many people seem to rate it as a strong entry in the series. I personally really like it, but I can see why others don’t go for it. I like fun, light things that don’t take themselves seriously. Despite the lack of success and how people seem to feel about it, the show did spawn one of the best known and most popular rides at the Disney parks with the Mad Hatters Tea Party.