Book Review - Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

The Mt Laurel Book Club discussed Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin on August 5th.This book sparked intense, but always friendly, discussion among our members. The premise of the book is engaging. By using factual information about the lives of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the author has created a fictional account of the life of Alice Liddell. Alice Liddell, as many of you will know, is the acknowledged inspiration for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The book's focus is on three eras of Alice's life: her childhood with Dodgson, her purported relationship with Prince Leopold in her twenties, and her life as a mother and wife. The author, Melanie Benjamin, does a wonderful job of giving Alice a distinct voice for each of the three ages covered in the book. This was a book that I enjoyed reading and have continued to discuss with friends. It has also kept me on the lookout for more information about these people and the events of their lives.

From Product Description:

Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole–and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.

What the staff is reading...

Me, Michelyn in Adult - reading Fire and Ice by Anne Stuart. The last one in her Ice series that I have not read. I'm enjoying it, but the romance is still not as believable as Bastien and Chloe's in Black Ice.

Kate in the Children's Dept - Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Lori in Teens - reading People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks for the Mt. Laurel Book Club

Katie, Director - reading Ice by Linda Howard. "It was a fairly enjoyable read, but it ended too quickly and it was a bit abrupt. The action and adventure in the novel was fast paced and overall a good way to pass an afternoon. Not her best work, but certainly not her worst."

Dee in Circulation is reading Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marian Keyes

Mt Laurel Book Club Review for South of Broad

The Mt Laurel Book Club met Thursday evening at Chuck and Gwynne Sams home to discuss Pat Conroy's South of Broad. The book, which has been considered to be the publishing event of the year, was liked by everyone and many members had already recommended the book to others to read. We had a great discussion due to the dynamic characters and situations that our hero, Leopold Bloom King, faced throughout the novel. The novel follows Leo King and the group of friends that he makes one summer for the next twenty years of their lives. It's a heavy book that deals with abuse, the 80's AIDS epidemic and other serious topics, but there were definite moments of humor. (I think we decided during the meeting that the novel covered every type of prejudice that we could think of that fit the scope of the novel's characters). Charleston was vividly portrayed in the novel - it could easily be said that Charleston was as much a character as the people in the book. Check this one out if you are looking for a thought-provoking read!!!

From Booklist
An unlikely group of Charlestonian teens forms a friendship in 1969, just as the certainties and verities of southern society are quaked by the social and political forces unleashed earlier in the decade. They come from all walks of life, from the privileged homes of the aristocracy, from an orphanage, from a broken home where an alcoholic mother and her twins live in fear of a murderous father, from the home of public high school’s first black football coach, and from the home of the same school’s principal. The group’s fulcrum, Leopold Bloom King, second son of an ex-nun Joyce scholar, who is also the school’s principal, and a science-teacher father, is just climbing out of childhood mental illness after having discovered his handsome, popular, athletic, scholarly older brother dead from suicide. Over the next two decades, these friends find success in journalism, the bar, law enforcement, music, and Hollywood. Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. --Mark Knoblauch

Mt. Laurel Book Club Meeting This Thursday!

The Mt. Laurel Book Club will be meeting this Thursday at 7 pm to discuss South of Broad by Pat Conroy. Call Lori at 439-5512 for meeting location and additional details!

From Booklist:

An unlikely group of Charlestonian teens forms a friendship in 1969, just as the certainties and verities of southern society are quaked by the social and political forces unleashed earlier in the decade. They come from all walks of life, from the privileged homes of the aristocracy, from an orphanage, from a broken home where an alcoholic mother and her twins live in fear of a murderous father, from the home of public high school’s first black football coach, and from the home of the same school’s principal. The group’s fulcrum, Leopold Bloom King, second son of an ex-nun Joyce scholar, who is also the school’s principal, and a science-teacher father, is just climbing out of childhood mental illness after having discovered his handsome, popular, athletic, scholarly older brother dead from suicide. Over the next two decades, these friends find success in journalism, the bar, law enforcement, music, and Hollywood. Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. --Mark Knoblauch