Solve the clues. Face your fears. Survive the Trials.

All Alice Liddell wants is to escape her Normal life in Oxford and find the parents who abandoned her ten years ago. But she gets more than she bargained for when her older sister Charlotte is arrested for having the infamous Wonder Gene—the key to unlocking the curious Wonderland Reality.

Soon, Alice receives a rather cryptic invitation to play for Team Heart in this year’s annual—and often deadly—Wonderland Trials. Now she has less than twenty-four hours to find her way into Wonderland where nothing is impossible . . . or what it seems.

The stakes are raised when she discovers players go missing during the Trials each year. Will she and her team solve the clues and find the missing players? Or will betrayal and distrust win, leaving Alice alone in a world of her own? Follow the White Rabbit into this topsy-turvy fantasy where players become prey, a sip of the wrong tea might as well be poison, and a queen’s ways do not always lead one where they ought to go.

Book 1 of The Curious Realities series.

Alice is only sixteen and already doing badly in the world, defying the law and doing poorly at school.¹ But she doesn’t want the world anyway. She wants to be that fantastic and dangerous thing, a Wonder. Of course, she soon reaches Wonderland, and all its color and chaos cannot hide its darkness. In The Wonderland Trials, Sara Ella crafts a dystopian retelling of Lewis Carroll’s classic, reinventing with flair all Wonderland’s denizens and infusing the story with freshness. Characters are sharply realized, and first-person narration gives the young heroine an appealing voice. The novel explores themes of believing without seeing, yet grants religion little notice or importance. Although indebted to a classic, The Wonderland Trials is inventive and colorful in its own right, abundantly able to charm and to intrigue.

Best for: Fans of dystopian tales and modern retellings of classic stories.

Discern: Peril to minors; games that serves as popular entertainment and sometimes cause physical injury to adolescents; frequent deception, even among those purportedly on the right side; the heroine steals and breaks the law without repentance or reckoning.