Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is a gloriously odd fantasy for 11 year olds about a bored girl who follows a White Rabbit down a hole.

What happens

Alice is sitting on a riverbank next to her sister, with nothing to do. Her sister's book has no pictures and no conversations in it. What's the use of a book like that?

Then a White Rabbit with pink eyes hurries past. He takes a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and frets that he's going to be late. Alice has never seen a rabbit with a waistcoat, let alone a watch, so off she goes after him.

The fall down the rabbit-hole is so slow that she has time to take a jar of marmalade off a shelf on the way (it's empty, sadly). And from there things only get stranger.

A little bottle marked DRINK ME shrinks her. A cake marked EAT ME makes her more than nine feet tall. She cries so much that she ends up swimming in her own pool of tears, next to a mouse who gets VERY cross whenever she mentions her cat. And a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom keeps asking who she is, which by then she honestly isn't sure about.

Reading it feels a lot like being inside a funny dream. Nothing follows on neatly from what came before, and nobody behaves the way they're supposed to. Alice keeps trying to be sensible and polite, and it never helps one bit!

She's lovely company though. She chats away to herself and tells herself off. She tries to check she's still herself by reciting her times tables, and four times five comes out as twelve. Even the poems she's learnt by heart come out wrong.

A lot of the fun is in the words. When the Mouse says his is a long and sad tale, Alice looks down at his tail and wonders why it's sad. Your reader might need to hear that one out loud to catch the joke!

Lots of children know this story from films. The book itself is chattier and sillier than you might remember. The sentences are old-fashioned and some of them run on for a long while, so this is one for a confident reader, or a lovely one to share.

What to read next

For a reader who'd like another magical creature with no manners, try Five Children and It. A family of brothers and sisters dig up a grumpy Sand-fairy in a gravel pit, and he's been around for thousands of years.