Unbirthday - Liz Braswell

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Alice is different from other eighteen-year-old ladies in Victorian Kexford, which is perfectly fine with her. She'd rather spend golden afternoons taking pictures with her trusty camera, chatting with her outrageous aunt Vivian, or visiting the children in the Square than receiving visitors or doing embroidery, thank you very much. She's also interested in learning more about the young lawyer she just met, but only because he's rather curious - not because he's rosy-cheeked and charming.

But when Alice develops the latest photographs of her neighbors, strangely familiar faces appear instead - the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, even the Caterpillar! There's something quite off about them, even for Wonderland creatures. And in her self-portrait, Alice finds the most disturbing image of all: an imprisoned and injured dark-haired girl begging for Alice's help.

Returning to the place of nonsense from her childhood, Alice finds herself on a mission to stop the Queen of Hearts' mad military march across Wonderland...and to find her place in both worlds. But will she be able to do so before the End of Time?"

I'll admit, I am not an Alice in Wonderland fan, and consequently I wasn't sure what to rate this or even how to talk about it. Consider this a disclaimer - if Alice is your thing, you may enjoy it more than I did, but the Wonderland storyline did not captivate me. It seemed like a lot of traveling back and forth for no real reason, and while I acknowledge that Wonderland's whole Thing is that it is built on nonsense, it all felt very pointless and overly long. The book is just over 500 pages, and honestly, most of that is Alice walking somewhere. I know it's about the journey and not the destination, but like...not literally?

My other major gripe with this book, which admittedly may just be me being too picky, is that this is less a fractured fairytale and more a sequel. You tell me there's going to be a Twisted Tale for Alice in Wonderland, I expect it to be a different spin on Alice in Wonderland...not Alice going back to Wonderland eleven years later. It felt a little bit like they didn't have any ideas for how to revamp the original story, so instead they were like "uhhhhh...let's just do this instead." Again, possibly a nitpicky gripe, but...it was a bit of a letdown for me.

The saving grace of this book for me was the real-world storyline. I wish we had spent less time in Wonderland and more time in the real world, because Alice navigating her sister and her man-friend supporting a horrible xenophobic bigot of a political candidate (shocker) connected with me immediately, and I would have loved to read more about her navigating that, spending more time with Katz and her amazing aunt, and finding ways to make an impact in her real world.

Overall, not a bad book, but it was not my favorite of the series. I'm looking forward to Go the Distance in April...although it looks like that will also be more of a sequel than a fractured fairytale. Le sigh. I guess I'm going to have to move past that.