Book Review: After Alice by Gregory Maguire

First off, I didn’t finish this book. I managed to suffer through 19 pages before I gave it up as a lost cause. However, I did take detailed notes on those 19 pages.

I really, really wanted to like this book! The premise sounded really interesting and it could have been great. Unfortunately, it was absolute rubbish!!! There can be no doubt about the author having a great vocabulary, however, great use of the vocabulary he does not have. I happen to love weird, obscure words and yet I couldn’t get more than 19 pages into this book. He needs to learn that you don’t need to spew every piece of interesting vocab onto the page. He over saturates his writing with words that 90% of people will not know nor have the inclination to find out what they mean. Besides that, he doesn’t take care to make sure the vocab is in keeping with the speaker using it!!! Ada is a child, she is not going to know even half of these words, yet alone be using them; the same can be said of the servants: it is highly unlikely that someone in their positions would know/use those kinds of words. He just pukes up every word he can think of onto the page without regard for who is supposed to be using it. Some of the words/phrasings he used were old-fashioned even for the time period the book is set in so there is no way they would have been used let alone by the person using them!! 

His narrative style is absolutely horrible!!! It’s not even clear whether this is a third person narrative or first person. Sometimes it sounds third person, but then it switches to sound like it’s first person. It’s just plain sloppy, you shouldn’t have to be guessing what the ‘voice’ of the writing is. In addition to this, the narrative is bogged down with too much, useless drivel. He describes useless things in ridiculous detail, and using the most obscure words possible. His phraseology is also extremely awkward and unnatural. While technically correct grammar, he ignores the other rules of grammar that say when there are more than one option of correct word order choose the least awkward one: he doesn’t, instead, he chooses the most awkward. He rambles, it took Ada 5 chapters to get from her house to Alice’s and we know they don’t live that far from each other as the house was close enough for her to walk to. He also has one chapter that is just two sentences, both dialog. No problem with the chapter being short, but there is no identification for either speakers, because they are talking about Alice you just assume it must be her parents, but nowhere does it tell you this. The way it is written also makes it stand out like a sore thumb because it is not consistent with the rest of his writing. He goes from boring, rambling narrative, to two short sentences of unknown dialog, and then back to the rambling.

There are also multiple examples of serious TMI. Do we really need to read about how bad the baby’s excrement/nappies smelled? Or have the author refer to the certain private body parts!?!??! Seriously! How is that necessary information?! Let alone appropriate information, especially since it was regarding an infant. That is beyond TMI and inappropriate, that is down right disgusting, disturbing, and verbal pedophilia. How did this get printed? 

And this was all just within the first 19 pages! I cringe at the thought of what the rest of this book was like. If you see this in a bookstore/library and think you might like to read it, for you I have this advice: put the book back on the shelf and walk away. It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.