Splintered

February 18, 2013
Howard's first book is as much a quilt as manuscript, stitching together bits of the zeitgeist with thread of the author's own spinning. Lewis Carroll's Alice serves as a backdrop, while characters like Brandon Lee's Crow and Neil Gaiman's Morpheus are models of dark desire. Protagonist Alyssa, however, is an original. The descendent of Carroll's Alice, 16-year-old Alyssa can hear bugs talking and fears she has inherited the madness that plagues her mother's side of the family. The only way to silence the insects' voices is by killing them, using the corpses as material for her ornate artwork. Howard's visual imagination is superior; a cavalcade of weirdness dances across the pages as Alyssa and her secret crush, Jeb, traverse a nightmare Wonderland, trying to save her institutionalized mother and resist the seductive influence of Morpheus. The story's creepiness is intriguing as horror, and its hypnotic tone and setting, at the intersection of madness and creativity, should sweep readers down the rabbit hole. Ages 14âup. Agent: Jenny Bent, the Bent Agency.

December 1, 2012
An Alice returns through the rabbit hole in this cinematic if oversaturated goth-punk retelling of Alice in Wonderland. When she reached adolescence, Alyssa Gardner began to hear voices, like her mother and the other "Alices" before her. Instead of talking back, she kills the whispering bugs and flowers and uses them in her morbid art, maintaining her spot as school oddball and tortured artiste. Madness, gift or curse, Alyssa ignores the legacy of Alice Liddell until she must enter Wonderland to save her mother. With hot crush Jebediah Holt--artistic, scarred and with an endlessly fascinating labret--in tow, Alyssa races to correct the original Alice's mistakes, drying up the sea of tears, punishing the walrus and restarting the tea party. Alyssa's rather muddled mission becomes even more convoluted thanks to tasks assigned by Morpheus--a dark butterfly-boy who has haunted her since childhood. Alyssa thrives in the chaos, though characters' murky motivations cast her as pawn rather than queen in Morpheus' ever-shifting chess game. Howard playfully employs Carroll's original matter, but the absurd Victorian framework suffers under the weight of a standard teen love triangle as well as added issues of parental abuse and mental illness. Attention to costume and setting render this a visually rich read. More Tim Burton than Lewis Carroll, a sensuous version of Alice's adventures for the Hot Topic crowd. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

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May 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-This darker, modern update of Alice in Wonderland is more likely to please fans of Tim Burton's film adaptation than those of Lewis Carroll's novel. Alyssa, 16, is a descendant of Alice Liddell, the girl who was Carroll's inspiration for Alice. Her mother lives in a mental institution, and she herself struggles with hearing voices from insects and flowers. Do the women in her family suffer from a curse that can somehow be traced back to the original Alice? The opening chapters drag a bit, but the action picks up when Alyssa finds herself in Wonderland, fighting for her survival-and for her mother's sanity. Howard maintains a lush atmosphere throughout, reintroducing Carroll's characters as truly nightmarish monsters. Though Alyssa's ongoing quests can sometimes seem aimless and the requisite love triangle forced, teens looking for a creepy, descriptive read with a generous dollop of romance will gravitate toward this title.-Hayden Bass, Seattle Public Library, WA

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Grades 8-12 YA authors have used fairy tales and fantasy as a backdrop for contemporary stories for decades, and first-time author Howard is no exception. Relying on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as the infrastructure, as well as Tim Burton's fantastical movie landscapes for inspiration, Howard crafts a teenage skater girl, Alyssa Gardner, who feels compelled to throw herself down the rabbit hole in an attempt to cure her mother's madness and quiet the ever-increasing chatter in her own head. But Alyssa does not make this journey alone. Childhood friend Jeb enters Wonderland with her, a constant grounding to the real world as they encounter Morpheus (who sports a hookah), Rabid White, Chessie, the Red and Ivory Queens, and other iterations of Carroll's familiar characters. It's a deft, complex metamorphosis of this children's fantasy made more enticing by competing romantic interests, a psychedelic setting, and more mad violence than its original. With one test after another that she must pass, Alyssa soon learns that the only person she can rely on is herself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2013
Ever since her ancestor, Alice Liddell, returned from Wonderland, the females in Alyssa's family have all gone mad. Hoping to break the curse, Alyssa goes down the rabbit hole in search of aid from a mysterious netherling called Morpheus. This is a darker Wonderland than Lewis Carroll's, and while Howard's story is admirably ambitious, the prose is saccharine and the plot is convoluted.

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)