Alice I Have Been by Melaine Benjamin

Alice I Have Been by Melaine Benjamin
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.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.

This was an interesting novel, it got rave reviews so I was excited to read it. But I gotta say I really had a hard time getting into this book. I just found the relationship between Alice and Mr. Dodgson rather disturbing. At first I thought it was just me, but I searched a little harder and did find some reviews that had the same feeling as myself. After Alice got older and didn't associate with Mr Dodgson anymore I liked the book much better. An interesting life for Alice and I do have to admit that I never knew Alice was based on a real person. I have never read Alice in Wonderland before, but now it is part of my March to read pile.