Alice in Wonderland

by Lewis Carroll, Diane Vanden Hoven Narrated by Georgia Lee Schultz, Barbara Rosenblat, a full cast

Overview

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland comes to life again in this dramatized version of the timeless classic, with stellar performances by Georgia Lee Schultz as Alice, and multi-award-winning Barbara Rosenblat as the Mouse, Duchess, Cheshire Cat, and the Queen. This version features a full cast of characters, music, and sound effects and introduces the original song "My Garden Back Home."

Join Alice on her strange and wonderful adventures into the world of the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, and the Hatter.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

A pensive, titian-haired Alice trips down the rabbit hole in this adaptation that pairs the classic story with gracefully expressive illustrations. Ingpen’s detailed visions of the menagerie of creatures Alice meets lend them anthropomorphic qualities while remaining anatomically precise. The Cheshire cat, who peers out at Alice from a crowd of leaves with a milk-tooth smile, does so with kittenish serenity. The infamous tea-party is a cozy affair with intimate soft-focus portraits in pencil of the sleepy dormouse, hare (who dips his watch into his cup of tea) and the rather bleary Mad Hatter, whose pencil-drawn sidewise glances suggest it’s all dreamy good fun. A lovely and faithful interpretation. Ages 10–up. (Nov.)

School Library Journal

Gr 4–8—Matthews, well known for his work in sci-fi and fantasy realms, turns his attention to Carroll's classic. His illustrations, which vary between single- and double-page full-color airbrushed paintings and smaller sepia-toned vignettes, have an imagination-stretching, otherworldly veneer. Rich in purple and green hues, the cartoon artwork portrays an Alice with a somewhat angular face and straight blond hair. The depictions of the other characters are fresh and creative, as each familiar figure is festooned with delightfully exaggerated features, kinetic lines, and jewel-toned costuming. The paintings have a fine-art quality to them, and the grandiose scenes provide much detail and action for readers to explore and enjoy. Card-suit motifs appear in both the handsome book design and within the illustrations themselves. Unfortunately, some of the double-page artwork gets lost in the book's gutter. Matthews admits to suggesting "a wider visual arena for the story, including a space scene and the Palace of Hearts (not mentioned by Carroll)." The consistency of artistic vision and quality of the illustrations make this re-interpretation a success. The small-size type, which may demand more accomplished or patient readers, and the sophisticated visual tone make this volume appropriate for older Alice fans.—Joy Fleishhacker, School Library Journal

Catherine Rinella

‘Alice In Wonderland is very well done! Bravo!”

host of the Radio Drama Revival podcast Fred Greenhalgh

Great work! Love the lush sound design—knowing how ‘classic’ the original is, I appreciated (their) ability to reimagine the tale for the audio format.”

Bookphonic

Alice in Wonderland comes to life again in this dramatized version of the timeless classic, with stellar performances by Georgia Lee Schultz as Alice and multiaward-winning Barbara Rosenblat as the Mouse, Duchess, Cheshire Cat, and the Queen. This version features a full cast of characters, music, and sound effects and introduces the original song ‘My Garden Back Home.’”

Radio Drama Reviews Online

Schultz’s Alice was the fulcrum of the entire revival as she not only narrated the story but communicated her thoughts to listeners in asides. It was a tribute to her acting skill that she came across as a level-headed personality, someone who remained distinctly unfazed by what was happening around her. Hence her ability to treat the entire journey as a dream at the end.”

AudioFile

Award-winning voice actor Barbara Rosenblat leads an able cast in giving proper nineteenth-century accents and voices to all our favorite iconic characters…Energetic newcomer Georgia Lee Schultz provides Alice with an updated and nicely understandable American accent and is especially good with the many whispered asides that stitch this adapted version together…It is always refreshing to hear the language and intended story of the original.”

Denver Post - Clair Martin

Pair[s] a perpetually suspicious Alice with peculiar creatures that well warrant her chariness.

Toronto Star

Ferocious Steadman spin.

Seattle Times - Mary Ann Gwinn

Carroll's hall-of-mirrors children's tale and Steadman's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" style make for an eerily perfect fit.

San Diego Union-Tribune - David Elliott

Explosive ink drawings... acidic whimsies splash across pages, bringing dear Alice a newly stimulating cup of tea.

Victoria Times-Colonist - Liz Pogue

Sophisticated humor

Children's Literature - Cindly L. Carolan

The familiar cast of characters... takes on a bizarre life of its own with Steadman's black and white illustrations. Children... will be curious, confused yet amazed by what they read and see in this book

Waterbury Republican-American - Betsy Daley

Alice as you've rarely seen her... fun for all ages... full of the wit and wisdom Carroll originally gave us.

White Rabbit Tales [Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of Canada]

[Steadman's drawings] are still remarkably fresh and unique.

North Shore News - Terry Peters

A world where people fall down rabbit holes and confront talking caterpillars is a place where Steadman would feel comfortable. An interesting look at the artist at an earlier stage in his own artistic approach.

dingbatmag.com

Don't count on a bookful of sweet, charming etchings of the shrinking golden girl; this is a somewhat less flattering Alice than the one we've come to know and expect. In over 40 pen and ink illustrations, this Wonderland is more tempestuous; of greater, grittier (and funnier) distortion... when dangerous satirists like Steadman exercise their imaginations and lyric, delirious pens in the slivers and shards of a distorted world — look out.

Children's Literature - Cindly L Carolan

The familiar cast of characters takes on a bizarre life of its own with Steadman's black and white illustrations Children will be curious, confused yet amazed by what they read and see in this book

dingbatmag com

Don't count on a bookful of sweet, charming etchings of the shrinking golden girl; this is a somewhat less flattering Alice than the one we've come to know and expect In over 40 pen and ink illustrations, this Wonderland is more tempestuous; of greater, grittier (and funnier) distortion when dangerous satirists like Steadman exercise their imaginations and lyric, delirious pens in the slivers and shards of a distorted world — look out

White Rabbit Tales [Newsletter of the Lewis Carrol

[Steadman's drawings] are still remarkably fresh and unique.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169691429
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/13/2015
Edition description:	Adapted
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

Read an Excerpt

From Tan Lin's Introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There pursue what lies beyond and down rabbit holes and on reverse sides of mirrors. But mainly their subject is what comes after, and in this sense the books are allegories about what a child can know and come to know. This quest, as in many great works of literature, unwinds against a larger backdrop: what can and what cannot be known at a particular historical moment, a moment that in Lewis Carroll's case preceded both Freud's speculations on the unconscious and Heisenberg's formulation of the uncertainty principle. Yet because the books were written by a teacher of mathematics who was also a reverend, they are also concerned with what can and cannot be taught to a child who has an infinite faith in the goodness and good sense of the world. But Alice's quest for knowledge, her desire to become something (a grown-up) she is not, is inverted. The books are not conventional quest romances in which Alice matures, overcomes obstacles, and eventually gains wisdom. For when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she is already the most reasonable creature there. She is wiser than any lesson books are able to teach her to be. More important, she is eminently more reasonable than her own feelings will allow her to express. What comes after for Alice? Near the end of Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice, "Something's going to happen!"

Quests for mastery are continually frustrated in the Alice books. In comparison with the ever—sane Alice, it is the various Wonderland creatures who appear to be ridiculous, coiners of abstract word games. Yet Carroll also frustrates, with equal precision, Alice's more reasonable human desires. Why, after all, cannot Alice know why the Mad Hatter is mad? Or why will Alice never get to 20 in her multiplication tables? In Carroll, the logic of mathematical proofs runs counter to the logic of reasonable human desire—and neither logic is easily mastered. To his radical epistemological doubt, Carroll added a healthy dose of skepticism for the conventional children's story—a story that in his day came packaged with a moral aim and treated the child as an innocent or tabula rasa upon which the morals and knowledge of the adult could be tidily imprinted.

Alice embodies an idea Freud would later develop at length: What Alice the child already knows, the adult has yet to learn. Or to be more precise, what Alice has not yet forgotten, the adult has yet to remember as something that is by nature unforgettable. In other words, in Alice childhood fantasy meets the reality of adulthood, which to the child looks as unreal and unreasonable as a Cheshire Cat's grin or a Queen who yells "Off with her head!" But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn't quite yet realize that the adult's sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children—the dream within the dream, as it were—is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult's quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms—and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes: "Freud is not really saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. Looking forward . . . is a paradoxical form of looking back. The future is where one retrieves the pleasures, the bodily pleasures of the past."¹ The Alice books manage to show both these quests—that of the child to look forward, and of the adult to look back—simultaneously, as mirror logics of each other.

Like both Freud and the surrealists, Carroll implicitly understood that a child's emotions and desires appear omnipotent and boundless to the child—and thus make the adult's forgetting of them difficult if not illogical. Growing up poses psychological and logical absurdities. The quandary of a logically grounded knowledge constituted out of an illogical universe pervades both books. The questions that Alice asks are not answered by the animals in Wonderland nor by anyone after she wakens. It is likely that her questions don't have answers or that there are no right questions to ask. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass remain the most prophetic of the nineteenth century's anti-narratives, inverted quest romances, circular mathematical treatises on the illogical logic of forgetting one's desires. They display a logic that the child must master in order to grow up. As the White Queen remarks of the Red Queen: "She's in that state of mind . . . that she wants to deny something—only she doesn't know what to deny!"

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