Splintered - AG Howard (4 Stars)

This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl’s pangs of first love and independence. Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers—precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.

When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family.

She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.

Now, LA reads a lot of different things and sometimes refers to herself in the third person because she's crazy. But I don’t just read different things. I also write different things, and one of the things I love to both read and write about is Alice in Wonderland. It takes a lot to write a really good Wonderland story. Tim Burton did it with his film from 2010, and AG Howard has done it now with her fantabulous foray into the absolutely brilliant and bizarre Splintered.

Just so we're clear, this review contains SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS
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There. That should do it.

Now, this woman is the queen of creepy, a sorceress of the surreal, a witch of wordsmithing, a magician of madness, a wizard of Wonderland really cool. She took a book that actually isn't that great on its own (c'mon, Alice in Wonderland spawns abso-fantastic sequels and adaptations, but the source material's pretty satirical and very classic-lit, which I like in some instances, but not this one) and she managed to make something freaky and bizarre and utterly amazing out of it! I love Splintered, and I am going to tell you why!

Follow me down the rabbit hole, everybody, if you please…

First of all, there's Alyssa Gardner. I cried like a little baby was a bit put-out at first when I saw the MC' name was Alyssa because that's the name of my main character in my Alice in Wonderland urban fantasy faerie quartet, The Twilight Chessboard, but within the first five pages of Splintered I got over it real quick because boy, does AG Howard know how to start the creep off with a bang! I discovered right away that her Alyssa and mine are two completely different people. And besides, how many variations of "Alice" are there in the world, exactly? Not too many…

Alyssa Gardner is the girl I totally would've been friends with in high school — if she would've been willing to be friends with me. She's smart, she's spunky, and she can do some pretty wicked things on a skateboard. On top of that, she makes some of the most beautiful mosaics I've ever seen with my mind's eye (we'll touch on that later…). But on top of Alyssa's personality, she's the punky Alice I've always wanted to see. Tim Burton chose a certain wardrobe style for his Alice in the 2010 film, to give her more of a punkette feel, but AG Howard took Alice and punk, threw them both in one of those drink-mixer thingies (I don't know what they're called, I don't drink, but bartenders use them), and shook that thing up like a tornado. When she dumped it out, we got Alice 2.0 — and she is ready to kick some Wonderland butt.

Her backstory is incredible, too. Turns out she's a descendant of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll's bizarre-o children's books. And apparently all the women in her family are bat-crap crazy insane. They hear flowers and bugs talking when they hit puberty. Alyssa's mom, Alison, is currently locked up in a nuthouse almost the entire book, eating junk out of teacups. Alyssa can hear them talking, too, but she keeps that a secret because she does not want to end up in a straitjacket. Who would?

Quick side note regarding Alyssa's mosaics and the fact that she can hear bugs talking: she makes her art out of insects (obviously dead ones). At first, that totally creeped me out and made me think this girl might be a bit of a psycho kind of squicked me out a bit, but once she described all the cool things she made, I was like, "Oh, never mind. I'm on board the we're all mad here, death to buggies, let's kill some more! pesticide bandwagon! These are pretty!" And her justification for using insects in her art is pretty understandable ("I've been collecting bugs since I was ten; it's the only way to stop their whispers…Once they get chatty, they're fair game.") and is explained on page one, so I'm okay with it.

Alyssa has two guys in her life who basically equate to two Wonderland characters: Jeb the Heroic but Kind of a Pansy Skater Boy (we'll get to that later) and Morpheus the Hot but Kinda Jerky Magical British Guy — aka, the Silver Knight and the Mad Hatter.

Jeb has been Alyssa's friend since they were kids and she is hopelessly, madly in love with him and wants to have his babies has a biiig crush on him. Unfortunately, Jeb the Complete and Total Pansy Moron Skater Boy doesn't seem to realize Alyssa has a thing for him (though that is not why he's a moron) and is currently dating the girl whose goal in life is to make Alyssa's life suck (that is why he's a moron).

The reason he's the Heroic  but Kind of a Pansy Skater Boy is because he nearly sacrifices his life to save Alyssa. The only reason his life doesn't get sacrificed is because he gets rescued, but he totally would've done it for her. Which annoys me because I don't want to like him, because of how he handles the whole evil-girlfriend bit, gah. But I do, because when Alyssa really needs him, he's always there, and he always puts her safety first, and he's totally in love with her. The idiot.

Why, AG Howard? Why must you make Jeb so flawed and annoying and likeable? Never mind, I already know. It's good writing…but so frustrating for us readers, sigh.

But I still don't approve of how he thinks it's okay for him to try and take control of Alyssa's life just because she's young. I get that he's trying to look out for her, and he's not abusive about it (it's big things, like when she wants to stay in Wonderland and help Morpheus and Jeb's like, "You must  be on drugs. That is so  not happening. We're going home. You're not thinking straight. This guy's doing some kind of mojo on you."), but it still bothers me and makes Jeb seriously not the guy Alyssa should get with. At least Morpheus respects her intelligence. Yeah, she might make mistakes, but Jeb's not infallible and he really needs to not act like it. And he needs to not get ticked off about petty things (like Alyssa taking money from Taelor, her enemy, the witchy girlfriend who's made Alyssa's life into a niche of Hades for years and years on purpose, because Alyssa needed it to save her mom's life and couldn’t get it any other way) when he's gone and done crappy things to Alyssa, too. So meh on Jeb.

Morpheus has also been friends with Alyssa since she was a kid…but she doesn’t remember him. And he is madly in love with Alyssa and wants her to have his babies has a biiig crush on her. His theme song really should be "White Rabbit" (originally by Jefferson Airplane, but the version that reminds me of Morpheus is the version done by the Crüxshadows. “…a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call. He called Alice when she was just small…"). Morpheus is so cool, and not just because he's got this smokin' hot cockney accent and muscles and he's so smexy, why is he smexy, why, it makes no sense, he's not even human, why does this always happen to me? handsome. I've read and seen several different versions of Alice in Wonderland over the years and this is the first one I've seen where someone smushed the Mad Hatter and the Caterpillar into one person (and then had the Caterpillar grow up into a butterfly…or in this case, a moth). That right there is incredibly creative. So kudos to AG Howard just for that.

Although I have to wonder why the Caterpillar is always blue? In the Tim Burton movie, in this book (well, Morpheus is sort of blue; he has blue hair), in the animated Disney film, in The Looking Glass Wars. Why is he always blue?

Morpheus has all the answers to Alyssa's questions — why can she hear flowers and bugs talking? What is the deal with this so-called Liddell curse that makes the women in her family able to hear them? Is Wonderland real? And why does Alyssa have the same mark — a mark she always thought was a birthmark — that Morpheus has?

(Footnote: No, they're not related. Ew! He's her love interest, for crying out loud. That sort of thing only works in seriously angsty books like Flowers in the Attic)

Morpheus is willing to give Alyssa the answers she seeks on one condition: she has to come to Wonderland and endure a series of mini-adventures to right the wrongs Alice Liddell apparently did to Wonderland and the local populace, called netherlings. If she manages to fix all the things Alice messed up in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (like crying that giant pool of tears, which totally screwed up the netherling ecosystem), Morpheus will help Alyssa break the curse on her family and save her mom from the horrible things that they're going to do to her in the asylum. But there's more to what Morpheus wants than he's letting on (duh, of course there is) and Alyssa has to find out what it is before she and Jeb end up royally screwed.

AG Howard should seriously  be congratulated on what she's done with this book. She's taken the creatures we all know from the classic novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and turned them into absolutely freaky new things. The walrus from the Carroll poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things; of shoes and ships and ceiling wax; of cabbages and kings. Of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.") has been turned into something completely bizarre with squishy tentacles and octopus suckers and waaay too much blubber and seriously sadistic tendencies and a serious need to go on a diet different. The Bandersnatch is still as scary as ever, but I didn’t even recognize the Jabberwock (which is a good thing; she is ridiculously creative, man!) or the White Rabbit.

I couldn’t call the plot at all. That is actually pretty hard, and most of the books I review are the ones I can say that about. I hate it when I can call the plot. But I couldn't call anything in this book at all! It kept me guessing right to the second-to-last page (since the last page had like, 2 paragraphs on it — whoopee…).

All in all, this book is a 4.75/5 stars. Only one thing kept it from being a full 5 stars — Jeb and the fact that he's not just Heroic, but a Heroic Pansy. And she's with him at the end…well, sort of. She wants to be with him instead of with Morpheus, and I'm like, "I get that he's sneaky and a bit manipulative, but he seriously pulled through for you in the end every time, Alyssa, seriously! He totally had your back the entire time! Whereas Jeb has your back on the big things but not in the small things like with the stupid girlfriend! GAH!!! Morpheus is better!"

Meh. She's running away from the truth. She'll get over it eventually. Morpheus has her back. Jeb probably doesn't — not every time. Sure, when it's super important, but boyfriends should have your back every time. So meh.

Anyway, AG Howard, my verdict is clear — your book is awesome, I can't wait to read Unhinged, and please let her get with Morpheus because I'm sooo ticked about the whole way Jeb handles the girlfriend-thing. Boo. But I adore you anyway! So much love pouring out of me right now  that I can't EVEN  because this book is the most amazing thing I've ever read in my entire literary existence except for Nevermore  and Dearly, Departed!  This is going on my I LOVE YOU SO MUCH shelf right next to those two books because it's so incredibly fantastic, it's so fantastic I'm gonna die ohmigawd!

Best,

LA Knight

PS — I'm currently reading this book to my roommate, and we had to stop while she was making dinner because she got so wrapped up in it that she forgot to flip the pancakes and we ended up with a few pieces of flat charcoal.

PPS — I've finished book two, Unhinged. All I can say, AG Howard, you are so cruel to me! Whyyyyyyyy?!?!