Wonderland by Juno Dawson review

Everyone knows who Juno Dawson is she's an amazing author and LGBT+ Activist and also was part of the team on my favourite anthology of 2019 Proud. So When I heard she was doing a version of Alice in Wonderland I was interested.  Anyone who's followed this blog for a while knows I'm a huge Wonderland fan so this was a bit of a treat.



Firstly big thanks to Bkmrk as I won this from them and an awesome set of cards.It meant I got a proof of the book and got to read it before others so that was really cool. I do get proofs sometimes but  I think is the first one I've covered on this blog as a review so It'll get on the general disclaimers ok. This was not in exchange for a review and in no way changes my opinion.

Anyway as I said I'm a huge Alice in Wonderland fan so I was slightly hesitant to read this. There are many very very good adaptations and rewrites of Alice out there and there are many very poor ones. This one I'd say wasn't my favourite in the whole world but it was nowhere near as bad as some of the worst  out here. I'd say it's about a 3.5  out out of 5 on the Alice scale!


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Anyway lets get into the setup Alice Carroll is a student at St Agnes's Boarding School for Girls who is always getting into trouble for not paying attention or dying her hair bright blue. When her best friend Bunny Lidell goes missing she feels she has to find her and thats when she finds out about a big party called Wonderland filled with posh people where she thinks Bunny might be.

Ok so firstly this one has quite a big heap of Dark Academia in it which I am very into at the moment. Lots of big stately homes, boarding schools and secrets! Fantastic!

Theres was lots of super cool representation in this book too Alice is Pan and Trans  and she is an awesome character. The way her mental illnesses are portrayed is really sensitive and well done. She gets together with both men and women in the book and those scenes are very well written.

I loved some of the big scenes in the book with all these bizarre surreal contrasting elements. Some of it was both weird and creepy in this perfect way. They way the rich characters are portrayed as almost soulless beings driven by their lack of being held accountable was fantastic. Really reminded me of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby

This is a tiny niggle but one all the same but the use of the original names threw me out with the way they were used. Like Alice Carroll really? Nah man does not work me at all. It was so haphazardly done that it just drove me nuts.

Finally what I will say is that this book tackles some really dark themes and some of themes are super triggering so please be careful reading this book. There's a lot of sex, a lot of drugs and a lot of nasty things happen to our lead which was often quite graphic and horrible. It was quite a tricky read at times so look after yourselves out there.
If you do buy it please buy it from a indie bookshop cheers
Have you read this book? If so what were your thoughts ? Do you love Alice in Wonderland as much as I do? Let me know in the comments I love to hear your thoughts!


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If you do buy it please buy it from a indie bookshop cheers