Ani's Friday Faves: Favourite Youth Novel - Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

I'll be disappearing to our off-grid cabin in northwestern Ontario (the inspiration for the stories here) very soon with plans to write my next Iggy book, start plotting out my YA novel, and relax with my family for ten weeks. It's off-grid Canada, not off-grid USA so we don't have internet, cell, or even an indoor toilet. To scroll the web, I need to hike up to a chunk of Canadian Shield to get two bars on my phone. The plus is there are blueberries there through July to munch, the negative is that there are also deer flies and mosquitos that want to munch me. So, I'm unsure how much blogging I'll get posted for those weeks. I will do my best. I've decided to share my loves in a really easy way: Ani's Friday Faves. This series will be easy enough to keep up even if I can't post my Joanne's Cabin or other short stories as often.

I'm kicking off this new series with a super duper fabulous popular book.

I think the twistedness of my brain began with my mom's obsession with Grace Slick wailing away in White Rabbit. My mom was a super-fan of anything woman rock + folk. She loved Janice, Joni, Melanie, Jennifer Warnes, Heart, Cher (Until I Believe was released and rock was swapped out for dance) but she mostly loved Grace Slick. Isn't Grace Slick the most amazing rocker name? How could she not be the coolest? Ani Slick. Maybe I need to update my name? I think I'll wait until I move up to YA genre at some point. ;)

My husband is from a small town Mennonite community on the Prairies so he probably heard mostly country and hymns for the first ten years of his life and then there was me learning all about hookah smoking caterpillars, narcissistic queens, and little girls eating a variety of strange edibles. I can't just blame my mom for making me odd. My dad also contributed to my stellar bazaaro mind. Many of the stories I've been playing around with began with his twisted mind. Since he's passed on I can morph them any which way I like and you know what, he'd love it if he was still around.

As a teen, I loved nothing more than sleeping in on the weekend but my parents were early risers. I was allowed to be lazy until ten and then Bat Out Of Hell came on and my dad was a collector of music equipment. There were high quality speakers on every floor and they were all connected to Meatloaf Saturdays at 10am. No teen can sleep through that.

Okay, I went down a rabbit hole with that backstory. ;)

So, on with the why I love ALICE. I am weird because my parents were weird and regardless of if you believe it is nature or nurture, I had it thrown at me from both angles. And, because I'm weird I didn't only like Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, I was obsessed. I had and still have many: Alice shirts, a pencil case, book bag, tea cups, tins, posters, colouring books, dvds, vhs, paper dolls, five or six different editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, + Alice was on my list of names for my children (it didn't make my husband's cut). I've watched every movie I have found including any "based on Alice" movies like Dreamchild and Svankmajer's Alice. Okay, I've done some researching since I began writing this post and there are over 71 movies based on Lewis Carrol's classic as per IMDB so perhaps I was not as obsessed as I thought because I've seen maybe a dozen. I will say, the somewhat creepy 1985 CBS miniseries with Carol Channing is my favourite version. It's strange, they sing, and their costumes are odd. How could it get any better?

The one thing I don't love about Alice, okay, two things, are the new movies with Johnny Depp (and I like JD). They are just meh. Otherwise, there is no better youth novel. It's super imaginative, strange, fun, and completely confusing. What could be better than that?