Once Upon a Wonderland by DJ Stoneham

A swirling return to the dark whimsy of a familiar setting, Once Upon a Wonderland by DJ Stoneham details Alice’s fourth adventure to the time-spinning world of Cheshire cats and mad queens, and is as inventive and immersive as all of her previous trips.

As ever, the lessons learned on the other side of the looking glass have impacted her normal life. Her lost love, Jack Door, the black-feathered boy from her third trip, has never had an equal among Alice’s real-world suitors, so she longs to return. A tense family trip to the seaside yanks this older and wiser Alice back down the rabbit hole, where she must once again navigate a kaleidoscope of fairy tale characters, from Zezolla (Cinderella) and her fur slippers to the falsely accused Pied Piper, while the magic of Wonderland threatens to wind back Alice’s clock forever.

Children and adults alike will revel in this vivid reimagining of one of the most impossible realms in literature, taking the original story in new directions with Stoneham’s innovative take on the dark side of fairy tales. The author’s masterful dexterity with language is an impressive homage to Lewis Carroll’s own whimsical pen, and the wordplay throughout the novel is rich, clever, and unpredictable; there are poetic strings of verbose vocabulary and madcap flips of language, and even the occasional passage of rhyming prose for keen readers. Given the contemporary nature of this continuation, Stoneham also incorporates more modern and recognizable themes, from gender fluidity and bodily autonomy to unrequited love and the privilege of birth, for a novel that impressively manages to be both a homage and an update.

Engaging, entertaining, and wickedly smart, Once Upon a Wonderland is so respectful of its source material, and so clever in its own right, that fans of the original will not balk at the presumption of taking on such a classic, as it feels like a classic in its own right.