"The Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor

So I have a question. Why are there so many Alice in Wonderland reimaginings? We've had modern dystopian Alice in Wonderland (The Wonderland Trials), we've had fantasy dystopian Alice in Wonderland (this), there's an origin story for the Queen of Hearts, there are many more but those are the three that spring to my mind... what is it about this specific book that makes people want to do weird rewrites of it?

Case in point, this. It reimagines Wonderland as this fantasy world where imagination shapes reality, to a degree, sort of. The magic system is slightly squishy. Also everything has been taken over by the Queen of Hearts, who is a bloodthirsty tyrant and decided to make it dystopian.

I have a slight quibble with the beginning, in that the author feels the need to keep being like "They were so happy. If only they knew that it would all come crashing down..." throughout the first several chapters, which irked me. I suppose it was probably to keep the readers' interest, but there are better ways to do that.

The battle droid lookalikes on the cover are the Card Soldiers. They can fold up into a playing card shape. The playing-card storage form is cool, and they also look very intricate and menacing when half unfolded. It's a pity that their fully unfolded forms look so dorky.

This book is clever with its reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland plot points, I'll give it that. The trouble with this sort of thing is that there are only so many elements to the original story, and only so many ways to retool them. That said, there were two that I particularly liked: General Doppelgänger (Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I think), an army general guy who can also mitose into Generals Doppel and Gänger, and Hatter Madigan (it should be obvious), a highly trained royal bodyguard sort of person with a bunch of cool weapons. He's not very mad-hattery, but he's cool enough that I don't really care.

The tagline "Fantasy just declared war on reality" is rather misleading. Wonderland does not invade Earth (at least in this book). Which is a shame, because I would have loved to see Civil-War-era armies versus the Card Soldier armies of Wonderland.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: In this universe, mirrors are also portals to a sort of hyperspace thing which you can exit from different mirrors; it's used for travel. And now I'm imagining a crossover where Doctor Strange shows up in this book's mirror dimension.)