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Through the Looking-Glass : Alice in Wonderland Series - Children's Books Literature Classics

Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel

Through the Looking-Glass : Alice in Wonderland Series - Children's Books Literature Classics

eBook (Goldfish Classics Publishing )
Through the Looking-Glass : Alice in Wonderland Series - Children's Books Literature Classics, Complete Edition

ADDITIONAL CONTENT :
+ Active Table of Contents
+ Illustration Color from Original Book
+ The Author Biography
+ Annotation
- Plot Summary
- Characters List
- Adaptations

OVERVIEW:
Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The themes and settings of Through the Looking-Glass make it a kind of mirror image of Wonderland

SUMMARY:
Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") the offspring of Dinah, Alice's cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up on the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world. In this reflected version of her own house, she finds a book with looking-glass poetry, "Jabberwocky", whose reversed printing she can read only by holding it up to the mirror. She also observes that the chess pieces have come to life, though they remain small enough for her to pick up.

5 STARS REVIEWS:
Keely - Goodreads
I think that the failure not only of Children's Literature as a whole, but of our very concept of children and the child's mind is that we think it a crime to challenge and confront that mind. Children are first protected from their culture--kept remote and safe--and then they are thrust incongruously into the very world we spent twenty years telling them is so unsafe and unsavory.

And we expected them not to blanch.

It has been my policy that writing for children is not a trifling thing, not a simplification of the adult or a sillier take on the world. Good children's literature is some of the most difficult to write because the author must challenge, engage, please, and awe a mind without resorting to archetypes or life experience.

Once a body grows old enough, we are all pleased by the reunion of old friends, amused by a faux pas, or saddened by the thought of a breakup. We have knowledge and memory. The pain returns to the surface when beckoned, often we cannot even control it.

But we are not born with these understandings, so to make children understand pain, fear, and loss is no trivial thing. Education is the transformation of an erratic and hedonistic little beast into a creature with a rational method to judge the world.

A child must be taught not to fear monsters but to fear instead electrical outlets, pink slips, poor people, and lack of social acceptance. The former is frightening in and of itself, the latter for complex, internal reasons. Cultures fear exposing children to sexuality and violence because they are such natural urges. We fear to trigger them because we cannot control the little beasts: we cannot watch them every minute.

So, the process of creating children's literature is writing something complex and challenging, an idea the child can turn over in their mind without inadvertently wondering about things like anal sex and drug addiction. There is a fine line between exposing them to the world and simply leaving them exposed. We must remember that nothing we can come up with will be more strange or disturbing to a child than the pure, unadulterated world that we will always have failed to prepare them for.

However, perhaps we can fail a little less and give them Alice. Not all outlets are to be feared, despite what your parents taught you. In fact, some should be prodded with regularity, and if you dare, not a little joy.

Bonnie - Goodreads
Read both as a child, and again as an adult. Loved and appreciated it then; love and appreciate it now.

A book everyone should read at least once, and one that I hope children are still reading today.
Pages
138

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