FANGS, WANDS & FAIRY DUST: Trending on Alice What's your favorite?

It seems like everything is coming up Alice these days.

Yesterday, I reviewed Ali in Wonderland by Ali Wentworth (hilarious, btw). I commented that there seemed to be a lot of both Alice and Wonderland popping up lately. I thought I would take a look and share a few with you. I have only reviewed those where it says I have, but, just in case, I have place purchase links via the titles (movies) or the covers for books.

The whole story strikes me as falling through to a rather Spenserian fae-dimension. The two queens could be seelie and unseelie, and the hooka-smoking caterpillar and the Chesire cat, the mad hatter and al the rest strike me as varieties of fae. And the different potions are similar, of course to the snake-oil medications of the time, like laudanum or the actual heavy duty opium and such.

Do you know of, or have a favorite Alice besides the original, or is the original the best and/or only for you?

Movies: (titles are Amazon purchase links)

Malice in Wonderland (R)

Alice is an American law student in London. Knocked down by a cab, she wakes with amnesia in a world that's a million miles from home - Wonderland. We follow her adventures as she is dragged through an underworld filled with twisted individuals and the lowest low-lifes by the enigmatic cab drive Whitey (The White Rabbit). She needs to find out who she is, where she's from, and use what wits she has left to get back home in one piece.

Starring: Maggie Grace, Danny Dyer; Directed by: Simon Fellows
Release year: 2009, from Magnolia

Phoebe in Wonderland (PG-13)

This heartfelt, fantastical story of a troubled, imaginative girl devoted to Alice in Wonderland explores the agonies of growing up as an outsider and the complexities of parenting.

Starring: Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson; Directed by: Daniel Barnz
Release year: 2009, Studio: Image Entertainment

Books: (covers are Amazon purchase links):

Visually reimagined:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Camille Rose Garcia

Reading level: Ages 8 and up
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Harper Design (February 2, 2010)

Since its publication in 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland has delighted the world with a wildly imaginative and
unforgettable journey, inspiring children of all ages to suspend
disbelief and follow Alice into her fantasy worlds. This new gift
edition presents Carroll's tale fully unabridged with a unique visual
interpretation by renowned artist Camille Rose Garcia.

In BDSM erotica:

Alice (A BDSM Fairy Tale) (Modern Wicked Fairy Tales) by Selena Kitt

In this modern version of the fairy tale classic, Alice is madly in love
with a man who taps into her naturally submissive nature and introduces
her to the pleasurably painful delights of the BDSM world. When her
Wade Knight sends a car to take her to a strange and wonderful new
place, Alice finds herself in a very sticky situation where everything
is upside down and nothing is as it seems.

Kindle Edition File Size: 205 KB Print Length: 42 pages

Publisher: Excessica Publishing (April 1, 2011)

Literary Fictional Memoir:

Alice I Have Been: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) (DNF)
Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin’s spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend. Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she’ll always be known simply as “Alice,” the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she’ll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined. Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she’ll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever.

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (December 21, 2010)
Kindle Edition: 747 KB Print Length: 380 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press (January 12, 2010) Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
Hard cover Large Print and Audio Versions also available.

Comic-Mystery:

The Secret Diary of Alice in Wonderland, Age 42 and Three-QuartersAlice Harte's life is falling apart. Her boss at the real estate firm where she works is a litigious and murderous man with ties to "The Mob" in Florida. She KNOWS he has literally beheaded someone in the past.

Her whole life she has dreamed of living in England and meeting a man similar to John Cleese. In an attempt to start breaking away from her boss who is threatening her with a lawsuit, she flies to England to meet Nigel Channing, who has been charming her through e-mails and phone calls.

As her life in Miami falls apart, with mobsters and a pending fraud lawsuit, her romantic savior in England looks more and more tarnished by the hour. And then she stumbles across a beheaded mob boss. How will she ever keep her head and win the lawsuit? And what about love?

Kindle Edition: 446 KB Print Length: 238 pages
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services

Contemporary Short Fiction:

Alison Wonderland (reviewed) by Helen Smith

After Alison Temple discovers that her husband is cheating on her, she does what any jilted woman would do — she spray-paints a nasty message for him on her wedding dress and takes a job with the detective firm that found him out. Being a researcher at the all-female Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation in London is certainly a change of pace from her previous life, especially considering the characters Alison meets in the line of duty. There is her boss, the estimable Mrs. Fitzgerald; Taron, Alison’s eccentric best friend, who claims her mother is a witch; Jeff, her love-struck, poetry-writing neighbor; and last, but not least, her psychic postman.

Clever, quirky, and infused with just a hint of magic, Alison Wonderland is a literary novel about a memorable heroine coping with the everyday complexities of modern life.

Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books (January 3, 2012)

Kindle Edition: 442 KB Print Length: 201 pages
Publisher: AmazonEncore (August 16, 2011) Sold by: Amazon Digital Services

As Anthologized Erotica:

Alison's Wonderland edited by Alison Tyler (review)

Publication Date: July 1, 2010

Over the past fifteen years, Alison Tyler has curated some of the genre's most sizzling collections of erotic fiction, proving herself to be the ultimate naughty librarian. With Alison's Wonderland, she has compiled a treasury of naughty tales based on fable and fairy tale, myth and legend: some ubiquitous, some obscure—all of them delightfully dirty.From a perverse prince to a vampire-esque Sleeping Beauty, the stars of these reimagined tales are—like the original protagonists—chafing at desire unfulfilled. From Cinderella to Sisyphus, mermaids to werewolves, this realm of fantasy is limitless and so very satisfying.
Penned by such erotica luminaries as Shanna Germain, Rachel Kramer Bussel, N. T. Morley, Elspeth Potter, T. C. Calligari, Sommer Marsden, Portia Da Costa and Tsaurah Litzsky, these bawdy bedtime stories are sure to bring you (and a friend) to your own happily-ever-after.

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Spice; Original edition (July 1, 2010)
Kindle Edition
File Size: 341 KB
Print Length: 369 pages

There are many more plays on the name titles: a varieteria of ways in which the original tale of a young girl falling through to another dimension.

Some of these are merely taking advantage of a fortuitous confluence of an idea or a name that matches somehow. For others it is a stretch yearning to take advantage of the current popularity of mash-ups. Not everyone loves them. Some are good, some are funny, some are poignant. Like everything else there is good and bad.

So, today friends, I am having a common screening test that makes one loopy and sleepy afterwards. Just for today I am turning off moderation and turning on a comment report filter. This means if two people report something as offensive it will be removed. If I am in my right mind, I will take it over again, and, I hope I remember to do all this after I have written and scheduled this post!