She kills bugs as a way to deal with hearing their voices and then makes beautiful/creepy art out of them. What an opening line! It’s so cool! This girl, Alyssa, is slightly crazy but so relatable and likable that I kind of over looked it. Sticking a pin through the gut of an insect shuts it up pretty quick. I’ve been collecting bugs since I was ten it’s the only way I can stop their whispers. I sadly didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. The story turned into a shaky quest to get this thing so she could get that thing then the other thing and I easily got lost which made me stop caring about the story. The end never quite recovered from that loss of momentum from the slow middle. The middle suffered from way too much info-dumping. Alyssa, the main character, goes on a journey fixing what Alice broke in Wonderland, which I thought was a clever idea. Splintered starts out as an awesome retelling of Alice in Wonderland with a gothic twist. She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on.

When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together.

This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl’s pangs of first love and independence.Īlyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers-precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before.

Unhinged ag howard