The Lost Wonderland Diaries
by J. Scott Savage
Shadow Mountain, 2020. 344 pages.
Review written September 6, 2022, from a library book
The Lost Wonderland Diaries is a wonderful tribute to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a great-great-niece of Lewis Carroll discovers his lost diaries and gets pulled into Wonderland with her friend.
And it turns out that Wonderland is in trouble! They’ve been expecting an “Alice” to come and put it to rights. Celia is very sure she’s not the one. Her friend Tyrus, though, is an avid reader, and would love to be the hero of a story.
I probably should have remembered that I’m not really a fan of Alice in Wonderland before I picked up this book. The chaotic way the magic works, and Alice’s seemingly random progression through the story never made much sense to me, and this book is similar in that.
Now, there are some fun mathematical puzzles sprinkled through the books. I really liked Celia and Tyrus — even though they represent one of my pet peeves — the idea that “numbers people” and “books people” are wholly separate things.
Though in Celia’s case, she’s dyslexic, so it seemed fair that she’d have trouble with words and reading. (I wonder if she has trouble telling apart 9s and 6s.) I appreciated that she was shown to be intelligent despite her dyslexia. And Tyrus’s love for books and references to great children’s books was a lot of fun. I appreciated that both of them solved some of the puzzles with their own strengths.
But a little more problematic for me was the idea that the Queen of Hearts is all about logic and the King of Hearts all about imagination — as if those two things are opposites. I don’t buy it. Yes, the story showed that you need both, but I just don’t think they’re as fundamentally opposed as this book implies.
I suppose it’s all because two of my biggest passions are math and reading. And I actually think those things go together.
All that said, this was a well-written book and a good story. And yes, we need both imagination and logic! Fans of Lewis Carroll will especially enjoy it.
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