About the Author

Frank Beddor runs Automatic Pictures, and produced the hit film There's Something About Mary for 20th Century Fox. He hails from Minneapolis, and attended the University of Utah, where he trained for the US Ski Team. One of the world's foremost freestyle skiers, he won the World Championship twice. Frank began his entertainment career doing endorsements and commercials before performing the skiing stunts for the comedy Hot Dog: The Movie. Trading the alpine slopes for the Hollywood hills, Frank has acted alongside Emillo Estevez, Carrie Fisher, Chris Penn, Jennifer Tilly and Kevin Dillon.

Reviews

Gr 9 Up-Frank Beddor's clever novel (Dial, 2006) puts Lewis Carroll's heroine-along with her loony, puzzle-riddled world-into a new and wholly satisfying frame. In this version, most of Alyss Heart's family and friends are ruthlessly killed by her evil Aunt Redd. Alyss escapes through the Pool of Tears, which is actually a portal between worlds, and winds up in Victorian England and is renamed Alice. At first, the child tries to tell ordinary humans about her world and the power imagination actually effects in Wonderlandia, but they gently chide her for telling stories. She believes that she's found a sympathetic ear in a young Oxford don who is a friend of her adopted family, but he turns her story into the travesty we all know as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Meanwhile, Hatter Madigan, a member of Wonderlandia's Millinery, who also escaped through the Pool, searches for Alyss across continents and time, until he finds her more than a dozen years later. Back home in Wonderlandia, the few who have escaped evil Redd's soldiers plot to retake the land. Gerard Doyle reads with asperity and speaks the copious puns without any added slyness. Fans of Carroll's stories will flock to this and those who have managed to miss that less violent classic can get to it while waiting for the next volume in this exciting and humorous trilogy.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

This spin on Lewis Carroll's classic finds Alyss fighting to regain the throne from her evil aunt Redd. PW wrote that "fans of the source material will find this an entertaining diversion." Ages 10-up. (Aug.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.