A young girl takes refuge in a London Tube station during WWII and confronts grief loss and first love with the help of her favorite book Alice in Wonderland in the debut novel from Tony Award-winning playwright Steven Sater.
London 1940. Amidst the rubble of the Blitz of World War II fifteen-year-old Alice Spencer and her best friend Alfred are forced to take shelter in an underground tube station. Sick with tuberculosis Alfred is quarantined with doctors saying he won't make it through the night. In her desperation to keep him holding on Alice turns to their favorite pastime: recalling the book that bonded them and telling the story that she knows by heart—the story of Alice in Wonderland.
What follows is a stunning fantastical journey that blends Alice's two worlds: her war-ravaged homeland being held together by nurses and soldiers and Winston Churchill and her beloved Wonderland a welcome distraction from the bombs and the death but a place where one rule always applies: the pages must keep turning. But then the lines between these two worlds begin to blur. Is that a militant Red Cross Nurse demanding that Alice get BACK. TO. HER. BED! or is it the infamous Queen of Hearts saying...something about her head? Soon Alice must decide whether to stay in Wonderland forever or embrace the pain of reality if that's what it means to grow up.
In this gorgeous YA adaption of his off-Broadway musical the Tony Award-winning co-creator of Spring Awakening encourages us all to celebrate the transformational power of the imagination even in the harshest of times.
