Retro Friday Review : Alice I Have Been

Posted by kay on June 17, 2011 4:36 am in 4 stars reads | 7 comments

Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted at Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be an old favorite, an under-the-radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print, etc. Everyone is welcome to join in at any time!

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Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
Pages : 351
Genre : Historical Fiction
Stand Alone
My Rating : 

From Goodreads :

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

My Thoughts :

Alice I Have Been was such a captivating read that, when I finished it, over a year ago, I just couldn’t write the review. Unlike for Santa Olivia, it wasn’t that I feared I wouldn’t do the book justice; it was more that I had a hard time deciding what I thought of the book. Did I like it? Love it? What I hadn’t planned, though, was that this book would stay on my mind for a long, long time, so much so that, even without my notes, I could easily babble about it for a while even today.

Benjamin’s exploration of Lewis Carroll was a fascinating one, but certainly not an easy one. All through the novel, Alice’s now famous author is portrayed in an uncomfortable manner, one that makes you doubt constantly his motives; are they inappropriate? Is he simply an awkward man? I would think either or both depending on the scene, without being able to form a sure opinion. And that, for me, was what made the book powerful. The author took the facts, successfully wrote a believable story, without ever forming a final judgement on the character. It is left to the reader to try to understand, to imagine what has been or could have been.

If you happen to read the book and research the subject, you’ll quickly see that the author did a lot of research, and her website is a wonderful source for basic information. Though it is still a fictional book, it is anchored in the Victorian era and in its characters with detail. I do wish there would have been a little more on the subject of photography itself. Photography being fairly recent and still a lot experimental at the time, I believe it would have given an opportunity to develop even more the character of Dodgson, and maybe to explore his motivations for photography.

I know some readers mentioned that this dark tale changed their perception of Alice, but for me it didn’t. Maybe because, even as a child, I found Alice and her story to be uncomfortable. Maybe because I never considered it among my comfort fairy tales, like the Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood (of course at the time, I had only read children books retelling the story, and not the original ones). In any case, it didn’t affect how I perceived Alice, but I can certainly see why it would for some readers, especially those who have a strong attachment to the story.

Combining intriguing characters, a not too hurried pace and a beautiful writing, Alice I Have Been is a book I loved and really want to revisit at some point.