"The Wonderland Trials" book review
Faerie Trove, Issue #3
I’m Lydia Woodward and I write fantasy stories about redemption and forgiveness. To learn more, you can read my bio here or the about page here.
Welcome back, starling!
Today we venture into the Faerie Trove, a place of magic and treasure. Mind your step and keep an eye out for the daymares. 👀
Our prize is a mini portal. Concealed inside a beautiful, shiny tome of wonder. Let’s take a peek!
The Wonderland Trials
Genre: fantasy
Audience: young adult
Point of View: one
Tense: first person, present
Rating: five stars
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.
My thoughts
If you love Wonderland, if you have dreamed of following a white rabbit down the rabbit hole, then this book is a must!
The characters come to life on the page. The setting is both familiar and brand new all at once, and the story is so easy to read. I also loved the underlying Christian themes that shine through the plot. There was one part in particular that felt so much like a fantasy version of Old Testament metaphors that it blew my mind! So well done!
I cannot recommend this book enough. It has humor, romance, adventure, puzzles, and riddles… Just so much greatness packed into one story! It reads like a Percy Jackson book to me in the sense that it is very engaging and pulls you right into the story, but there’s a depth to it that I haven’t seen a lot of in middle-grade and young-adult novels (that could be on me, though, my TBR is long and I am slow 😅).
Definitely my favorite book of the year so far. 😍
Feel free to grab a copy and make this magical portal your own: https://a.co/d/cPXI7uA
But be quick! Legend tells that only so many of these tomes have the gold inlays underneath the dust jacket.
Until next week, have a blessed week!
Lydia Woodward ✨
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