Through the Looking Glass Retelling

Hello Readers!

Can I just say how fun it's been to write a retelling of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There? The Looking Glass world is basically a strange playground, and adding Peter Pan into the mix has been a challenge and a delight.

Enough potential spoilers! I wanted to dive into my experience with some of the research I did while writing this book. For my other fairytale retellings I went straight to my trusty Grimm's Fairytales to gather most of my source material. Not so for this one! For Lost in the Looking Glass, which combines characters from Through the Looking Glass as well as from Peter Pan, my source material was, of course, two public domain novels.

Confession time — I never loved the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. Can I say that here? It's my website so it should be a safe place, but I feel like rotten tomatoes may be thrown at me.

It's true, I never liked it as a child, and even now it irritates me. I have, however, read a few retellings of the stories which I have enjoyed, and when I finally read the original books, I liked them much better than the Disney version I was first introduced to. I had never realized that the Disney movie was actually based off of two of Lewis Carroll's books: Through the Looking Glass, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Among other creative liberties, I am actually retelling the second book first. Through the Looking Glass technically comes after Alice in Wonderland, although there isn't really any difficulty in mixing up the order for my Istoire series. And yes, I absolutely will be doing a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, just you wait.

For my Looking Glass retelling, I wanted to capture the unreality of the "mirror world" of course, as well as the backbone of how I've always viewed Alice's character—as a very matter-of-fact person. Even in the original novels, she is very present and deals directly with what's in front of her (although in a childish way), and I wanted to bring that trait to the forefront. I also found Through the Looking Glass to be slightly less manic than Alice in Wonderland, which is perfect for the space in my series that it occupies (real spoiler alert: my Alice in Wonderland retelling will be the final book in my series. Prepare for madness and mayhem to continue ratcheting up until then!). I also needed the Red and White Queen's stories to begin opening up, and since they both have parts in Through the Looking Glass, it was again a perfect choice to re-tell Looking Glass before Wonderland.

Although I did like Disney's Peter Pan as a child it was never my favorite. Reading the original novel by JM Barrie was a revelation however. He had such a unique tone of voice that I would equate to GK Chesterton or CS Lewis—a sort of cozy English spellcaster who safely flies you through a world of impish magic and disrupts your usual thought patterns. Although Peter can't help but be lovable, I've always viewed him as a selfish and thoughtless, even when I was a kid. And the relationship between him and Wendy has a lovely amount of tension to play with. Both of them have character flaws that rub at right angles in a way that can bring out the worst of each other. The Isle of Neverland was another pleasingly mad world that was on the same scale as the Looking Glass world - both are opposite ends of a mad spectrum. Neverland to me seems like a random fount of sunny chaos, while the world behind the Looking Glass feels more like shadowy organized madness—all along the confines of a chess board. Either way, they're two ends of a balanced scale. I couldn't help but wonder what would happen when the master of each world met each other...

If you haven't read either of the original books, do it! They're both products of their times, so there are elements which may make your eyes cross, but none of them are slow going, and they're classics for a reason. Really I view my Lost in the Looking Glass book and my Neverland Returns book as a duology within my series. Lost in the Looking Glass is primarily based off of Through the Looking Glass, but it tells much of Peter's story too. Neverland Returns is based off of Peter Pan, but it tells Wendy and Hook's story, with Peter and company as supporting cast.

I'm planning to post more about my character development for both stories in future posts, so I'll end here for today. Let me know what you love and hate about Through the Looking Glass and/or Peter Pan!