Review: The Final Alice by Alycia Ripley

Expect the Unexpected!

At the age of 30 Alice considers her life a waste of space. She has returned home. the Prodigal Disappointment,  to live with her parents knowing she has failed to live up to their expectations of what a young woman should have achieved by now. Added to which Alice has a very special great-great-grandmother......THE ALICE of Wonderland fame whose magic she tries to express in her writing but can find no evidence of in herself. She even prefers red to the blue and white her family favours.

But Alice's life is about to radically change. One day in the supermarket as she struggles to extricate herself from the car a voice offers to help and when she looks up....

".... a massive deer head took up the entire window. The antlers did not fit but the

head and face did. Its eyes were huge and yellow-brown; its lips pulled back to show teeth. I
screamed and clutched the steering wheel. Not having taken drugs in my younger days there was
no rational or chemical explanation but a flashback would be better than reality thrusting its huge
head inside."

With the appearance of Simmons, the talking deer,  the wild and wacky adventures of a very modern Alice begin. No rabbit hole for this girl - she faces her adversaries in the real world, in city and surburbia, in corporate businesses and family homes. Alicia Ripley has given her imagination full rein in creating the most wonderfully bizarre characters, friend and foe, and what fun it is to recognise those that are familiar from Wonderland under their new guises. It's the battle between good and evil and some of the villains are truly bad and their actions graphically gruesome - not something I'm always comfortable with but it was all so outrageously extreme that I found myself delighting in the gory details.

Alice's fantastical tale is her own but her experiences reflect the story of all us as we journey through the voyage of self-discovery, battling the demons of negative conditioning and the expectations of others and growing towards confidence and belief in ourselves. I really liked how this universal theme was woven into the story .

Great reading and I recommend !

Read more about Alicia Ripley and her writing at http://www.alyciaripley.com/main.asp

Once Upon A Time Challenge V