This is the first time I have ever read one of the Alice stories as well as any of Lewis Carroll’s works. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect given that it’s a book targeted towards children. Suffice to say that this story reminded me of the magic of the best children’s stories–– they envelop one like nothing else and reawaken the imagination.

The enveloping power of the author definitely contributed to the story’s heavy sense of unreality and the dreamworld. I found myself biting my lip and clenching my teeth at the intense – even frightening – inanity of the world through the Looking Glass. The lovely oddity that Alice first finds leads her into a strange, darker corners of the Looking Glass where time, space, and language all work in different ways. She must run to keep her place on the chessboard, fight to remember her name in the forest, and be prepared to rapidly launch from one reality to the next. Constancy and sense seem utterly abandoned in this world, but just as Plato’s Cave Allegory and Life is a Dream taught that we cannot trust our apparent reality, Looking Glass seems to clearly reflect the nonsense lurking just beneath the conventions of our reality.