Please note that the version of this book I am here reviewing is one printed in Stockholm in 1945, though the book is in English, so the illustrations would not be the same as in this version.
I suddenly felt the desire to read this book/these stories, though it turned out I had in fact many years ago read “Alice in Wonderland”, since I found the story so familiar.
Obviously these stories are classics, and I couldn´t give them less than five stars.
Alice goes down a rabbit-hole, and then falls down a deep well, and this is how she lands in Wonderland. I found the story charming and entertaining.
I didn´t find “Through the Looking-glass” quite so readable, however, perhaps because I tired of reading a children´s book that was pure fantasy and not filled with the usual sort of information I seek in a book. In this story, as indicated by the title, Alice goes through a looking-glass and finds a world where everything is back-to-front, reversed.
Alice seems to be participating in a chess game and runs around with the Red Queen and the White Queen, meets a Knight, and so on, and eventually becomes a Queen herself (she began as a pawn and made it to the other side of the board),
Lewis Carroll certainly had an amazing imagination. The illustrations are amusing, and when reading certain passages I found myself searching through the book to see whether there perhaps were illustrations of the incidents I was reading about.
I would think these were wonderful stories for a small child, or perhaps not one that is that small, as there are many passages and conversations which require a somewhat developed intellect to comprehend. But I really don´t know whether children of the modern world of TV, TV games, and computers would appreciate them. I can at least recommend them to grown-ups who have retained their imagination and sense of play! Enjoy!
