Book Review - Alice I have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Synopsis:  Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

First Line:  "Only I do get tired."

Random Quote:  " "May we be happy," I murmured, not quite understanding what I was saying, only that the phrase seemed familiar to me.  A ghost missive from the land of childhood, I mused drowsily, getting up to blow out the candle on my dressing table.  I stopped there and gazed at my reflection in the mirror, looking for some trace of the child I'd been - before."

Review:  This is a fictionalized account of the life of Alice Liddell (later Alice Liddell Hargreaves) the little girl for whom Lewis Carroll (a pseudonym for C.L. Dodgson) wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Edith, Lorina, and Alice Liddell photographed by C.L. Dodgson - Image via Wikipedia

I really enjoyed Part 1 of this book - the part covering the narrator's childhood and relationship with Dodgson.  The writing is evocative and inspires that sense of the Victorian childhood that feels central to understanding Alice.  The rest of the book is less successful - a romance with Prince Leopold, marriage, children, World War I, financial troubles - all of these rush past at a pace that feels wrong.  I've been complaining lately about books that need an editor because they're too long, but this is one book that I think would have benefited from more pages so the author could have stretched out and let her main character breathe more freely.

There is a lot of controversy about whether or not Dodgson was a pedophile and this book tends to fall on the side that declares him a pervert.  There is a later incident in the book between the narrator and John Ruskin that furthers this theme and feels gratuitous, marring the continuity of the narrative. 

It was a lovely idea - to flesh out the story of Alice, but in this form is only partly realized.

Reading Challenges:  Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2010, Speculative Fiction Challenge 2010, 100+ Reading Challenge, Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge,