2.0 out of 5 based on 1 reviews. – Customer review on 16/08/2011

In all honesty, I thought this book was going to be a lot better than it actually was. Quite disappointing, in fact.

Judging by the title of the novel, and the revealing portrait of ‘the real Alice’ on the front cover, I’d hoped that I was buying a saucy tale of untold love & romance, thick with intrigue and secrets buried in time. At the very least, I thought I was buying a thoroughly researched and in-depth study & analysis of the relationship between Carroll & his young Alice.

Whilst the book is indeed researched, it’s really nothing like I had originally imagined. Not only is it incredibly difficult to read and understand most of the time (say, for the average reader such as myself who doesn’t like to have to look-up every 5th word in a dictionary), but it literally is just two separate biographies – one of Carroll, one of Alice Liddel – that have been combined for the purposes of publishing a small book barely over 100 pages long. Whilst some (but not a lot) of the information about Carroll and Liddel in this book is indeed interesting, Winchester focuses surprisingly little on the relationship between the two. It’s as if he couldn’t find enough information to publish a biography on either one of the two, and tried to combine his notes on two different lives that meet very briefly in the middle of the book for story telling and a photo session, and then never speak to each other again. In fact, now that I think about, the book focuses more on Carroll (and his academic high’s and low’s throughout his schooling and working years) than it does on Alice.

Filled with uninteresting academic facts made more tiresome by the fact that you can barely understand what you’re reading in the first place, I would have to say that this is certainly not one of Winchester’s best books. I’m not even sure who I could actually recommend this book to – I doubt that even Alice in Wonderland collectors or fanatics would find this book very interesting.

However, I have decided to give this book two stars, purely for the fact that some research has evidently gone into Winchester’s work, even though the reader finishes the book none-the-wiser, and thoroughly less amused.