Splintered

I am a sucker for books that either re-tell or are influenced by the classics. Splintered first grabbed my attention with it's stunning color, then made it on to my OH MY GOD I WANT IT NOW! list, when I read the synopsis and discovered it was a continuation of the Alice in Wonderland story. Splintered is very true to Carroll's whimsical style but with enough of a twist to stand on its own. The characters are considerably more frightening and the story often dips into darkness which serves to create a more grown up Wonderland while reminding readers that there was real horror in some moments of the original (non-Disneyfied) version.

Alyssa was a strong enough character to carry the story, although I would have liked to see a little more character development. She seemed like a damaged little girl who was playing at being a rebel. At times, she was a little too trusting and took a bit too long to catch on to the obvious. I would have preferred if she had taken a more active role in success, but she seemed to simply stumble upon the answer, rather than work towards it. Her love interest, Jeb, was not my favorite person. He treated Alyssa like a child and was always running to her rescue (whether she needed/wanted it or not). I was pleased when he was conveniently removed from the storyline so that we could see Alyssa grow into her new place in Wonderland and meet her challenges on her own. I did, however, love Morpheous. He was very Mad Hatter-esque in that he had character and motivation. He was multidimensional in a way that most of the other characters were not and I kept wishing for him to pop up whenever the Alyssa/Jeb story started to get a little boring.

The plot of Splintered moved quickly as Alyssa was dragged from one challenge to the next. Morpehous' manipulations made for exciting situations and were the catalyst for an eventful race through Wonderland. Even though I did figure out the BIG plot twist earlier than Alyssa did, it still added a special element to the story and left me to re-examine earlier events in a new light.

Splintered is a very fun read. While it is violent and dark, it is not inappropriate for a teen audience and has enough romance to keep young girls interested. It is a definite must read for anyone who loved Alice in Wonderland or is a fan of whimsical stories with a little bite to them.

Featured on my blog here: http://thebibliohphile.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/splintered-by-a-g-howard/#more-391

Splintered follows Alyssa Gardner, a descendant of Alice Liddell, who’s the original Alice in the Lewis Carroll story. Ever since Alice, though, the women in the family all turn out insane at one point or the other. Alyssa’s mother reveals that the insanity is a curse, and she has to travel to Wonderland to break it. With her friend and crush Jeb, Alyssa heads out to Wonderland to save her mother and herself.

Since I have a lot of thoughts about this book, let’s split up into the good and the bad.

The Good
The strongest point of this book is the setting. It’s a lot darker than the original Alice, more reminiscent of Tim Burton than Lewis Carroll, but it does feature a lot of the same characters and the same land, in essence. Wonderland is described in great detail, and as I’m someone who’s always loved the story, it really went down well with me. My favourite is the way the author shows that Carroll ‘warped’ Wonderland into something much tamer, and what Alyssa sees is far more terrifying than in the story. It’s clear that a lot of effort has gone into the concept of Wonderland in Splintered, which I sincerely applaud. Dark!Wonderland is all the rage since Tim Burton’s movie, and it’s great to see that some authors can really pull off the setting.

The plot in itself was engaging as well, although it did get a bit repetitive, and at one point I had to wonder, was she doing this for her mom, or was it an extension of the love triangle?

And then there’s Morpheus. I’m a sucker for intriguing mystical immortals, and Morpheus is a great example of that. He’s got all the characteristics of one too, you know, the brooding, mysterious one with the connection to her past, the one she’s drawn to despite everything? Yeah. He’s a regular Keenan, and I love me some Keenans.

The Bad
The worst part about this book for me? Jeb, hands down. I get that he’s her best friend and that he likes to have control in his life because of his past, but his older-brother behaviour really got on my nerves. For majority of the journey through Wonderland, he’s telling Alyssa what she can and cannot do – really, Jeb? Is she the descendant of the original Alice, or are you, huh? Back off. What made it worse is that Alyssa didn’t stand up for herself either. When Jeb says, “Alyssa!!!! You could’ve been KILLED!!!!”, it somehow doesn’t occur to her to say, “Well, do you want us out alive or not?” If I’d been Alyssa, I would’ve punched him for the number of times he tried to dictate everything. Morpheus is really the only one who says Alyssa’s capable and that she shouldn’t be babied (thanks Morpheus, you rock). Also, the number of times Jeb says Morpheus can’t touch her? Um. Yeah, she can tell him herself. I might’ve cut this bit some slack if Alyssa had called Jeb out on his annoyingness, but NO.

And of course, there’s the love triangle. WHY. I’ve read far too many books with similar love triangles: the heroine, the best friend/one she’s known forever who’s super trustworthy and is wow-oh-so-wonderful, and the mysterious dude she’s drawn to who can show her her powers. It’s sort of a YA cliche, and in this situation, you’re either Nicki Beckett or Clary Fray. Not only is this trope just the sort of thing to get on my nerves, it feels like the triangle takes up way too much of the story.

I also feel like the memories Alyssa has of Morpheus, when he teaches her about Wonderland, aren’t exactly well-explained. There are several situations in the book where Alyssa knows what to do because of a memory, but we don’t get to read the memory. Instead there’s some random reference to Morpheus, implying that she knows because of a memory. I didn’t quite understand if the memories came in flashes at just the right time for her (which is how I saw it, and seemed sort of unrealistic to me) or came as a flood in the beginning. I get that revealing every memory bit à la Mara Dyer wouldn’t have made sense, but I still felt a bit off about it.

The other things that bothered me were pretty small, like the way Jen talks (she just talks so strangely. In the five lines she says, she sounds like the author tried to spew punkishness and cool-kid-talk – ‘fark’? Who says ‘fark’?) and a couple of typos I found. Typos don’t really bother me all that much, so just the fact that I noticed these enough to highlight them should tell you how engaged I was in the story…

I think I’ll wait till reviews convince me about the second book in the series.

(Source: I received a digital copy of this book for free on a read-to-review basis. Thanks to Abrams and Netgalley.)
Alyssa is hiding a secret. For the past six years, ever since she got her first period she has been able to hear plants and bugs talking, sometimes to her and sometimes to each other. As mad as this sounds, what scares Alyssa most is that her mother has been in an asylum for years for exactly the same reason. That’s why she doesn’t let anyone know what she can hear for fear of being locked up too.

Alyssa has a legacy to uphold though, her ancestor was the real-life ‘Alice’ from the Alice in Wonderland story by Lewis Carroll, and now it seems that it is up to her to break the curse on her family, caused by the original Alice’s actions.

Desperate to save her mother more pain and unnecessary treatments, Alyssa searches desperately for a way back to Wonderland to break the curse, and eventually finds herself down the rabbit hole with her secret crush Jeb.

Alyssa doesn’t understand how things work in Wonderland though, and the man who guided her there – Morpheus may not be as trustworthy as he originally seemed.
Can Alyssa possibly break the curse? Can she right Alice’s wrongs and set Wonderland to rights? Or will she find herself tangled up in an even bigger mess?


This was a total fairy-tale, filled with evil queens and helpless flowers! Alyssa was a fantastic ‘Alice’, and Wonderland was just so utterly strange and intoxicating.
Wonderland was a work of art in its own right, with no attention to detail spared. I don’t remember ‘Alice in Wonderland’ all that well, but each event in this book seemed to echo Alice’s original adventures, just with the twist that Alyssa was trying to put Alice’s wrongs to rights. The world building was elaborate and imaginative, and the storyline was new. There were also plenty of extra little touches to take this story from a copy, to a complex story in its own right.

I really liked Alyssa, and her fashion sense made me an instant fan! Love the gothic fairy look! (Imagine the girl on the cover with a bit more black eye makeup and some blue dreds among the golden locks and that’s the Alyssa in the story). She obviously wanted to help her mom, but she wasn’t a martyr either, and she did make mistakes. She was sort-of unprepared for what Wonderland would throw at her, and there was an on-going theme throughout the book that in Wonderland nobody can be trusted, and nothing is what it seems.
Jeb was a welcome addition to the story, with his continuous jokes and name-calling at Morpheus’ expense, and a hidden alpha-male protectiveness of Alyssa. The little touch of romance was good too, although I wasn’t overly impressed by the Alyssa-Jeb-Morpheus love triangle.

On the negative side, I did get quite confused towards the end. I found all the different things that were going on, and all the different ideas and prophecy stuff hard to follow, and I’m still not sure I really get it now. The storyline was quite complex, especially towards the end, and trying to work out exactly who said what, when, where, and why and what effect that had upon Alyssa’s present day situation was a bit difficult to follow, I think I’d need a pen and paper to try and work it out.

Overall though, this was an interesting spin on the classic ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story, with depth and character of its own, and if you like fairy tales, you’ll like this.
7 out of 10.