Also, there's this really bizarre scene with the assassin 'the Cat' going all Travis Bickle on a bunch of trees. Also, is it just me, or do you fall totally out of the story when the author bothers to include things like 'whoa' and 'duh' on a regular basis? Maybe I'm too picky. The dialogue! This is the sort of book in which we get full quotation marks for stupid things, like a character's 'yeah' of assent. But, sadly, the misplaced modifiers kill us dead. Not delightful headgear being worn by our heroes. with the play of the suns on their caps and the multihued shadows they cast on the valley floor, the Alyssians were greeted.' The subject of the beginning part of this sentence? Mushrooms. and out of the vacuous dark stepped a girl.' Vacuous does not mean what he thinks it does. But things ultimately got so bad that I started bookmarking pages specifically with the purpose of listing them here. I have an ARC, so I will hope the writing and grammar improve. There were moments of charming creativity there (I'll admit, calling the elite card soldiers 'the Cut' was cute), but really. Beddor should read, but let's just leave it that Alyss will probably not become a neurosurgeon.

King Nolan? This is only slightly a tougher name than Lord Poodlepants. Casting Lewis Carroll himself in the book as a bumbling, nervous idiot is just poor form. If you're going to write a metafiction (which is perhaps putting lipstick on the Looking Glass Wars pig), you certainly owe a certain reverence, or even just a bit of politeness, to the source material.

Beddor is just straight-up mean-spirited. I cannot think of enough negative things to say about this book.įirst, I have to admit something: I've never even read any of Lewis Carroll's books. Then I realized: what might I be giving my students? So I read it. So, I'd heard of this book before, and when I saw it in the bin marked 'free' at my old library, I kind of thought I might put it in my middle school classroom for students to read.

The looking glass wars book series