The Looking Glass Wars

The Looking Glass Wars is the first of three novels by Frank Beddor, published in 2004 and inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

In Beddor's version of the story, Wonderland is a real place and Alyss Heart is its rightful heir, until her aunt Redd seizes the crown and kills Alyss's parents. To escape, Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, flee through the Pool of Tears, and the crossing separates them: Alyss arrives alone in Victorian London, where she is taken in by an aspiring author to whom she tells the violent story of her childhood, and he writes it down wrong. Hatter Madigan, who knows exactly what happened, spends years searching the world for the lost princess and trying to bring her home before Redd's hold on Wonderland becomes permanent. The novel sets out a world built on imagination as a physical force, with cards, mirrors and hats as equipment.

Beddor writes the series as a dark adventure for younger readers, and its premise is that the most famous children's book in English got everything important about its heroine wrong.