I really found myself enjoying the beginning of the novel, the premise was fresh and interesting with a fun twist on Alice in Wonderland and a whodunit mystery, but by the time the novel was reaching its conclusion, and it felt like 6 different plot twists one after another trying to impress me with how clever it was, I got really bored. The writing isn't witty enough to carry the amount of dialogue that gets expelled at you constantly, the characters feel as flat as those from a children’s book but expect me to care about them beyond a surface "Good Guy" "Bad Guy" level, and god the barrage of twists near the end got so exhausting as each one felt a little more stupid than the last.
They do the same kind of twist three times, and it gets kinda annoying how much they rely on it, because the first time was kinda interesting if a bit predictable, but by THE THIRD PERSON HAVING THE SAME KIND OF TWIST, ITS A BIT FRUSTRATING! It also doesn't help how a Chekhov's gun that’s set up early gets forgotten by the narrative for so long, but by virtue it was established at all, I knew it had to come back and when it did, it felt really obvious how it was gonna be used. Somehow, this novel kept being predictable despite having an unpredictable setup and premise, that’s almost the most impressive part of the mystery, but that's not a good aspect for a mystery that you can see what it's going to do constantly because of how trite a lot of its decisions are.
I also found the use of Wonderland as a setting really lacklustre; it never grabs the imagination that it really should for a place so bizarre and strange feels tepid and mundane. Earths no better, as it never really visualises where anything is in a sense of space, my mind for most the novel imagined most encounters taking place in a white void of nothing where people just bickered back and forth for however long until we switched back to the other place to repeat the process. A novel can get away with just being a lot of dialouge if that dialogue is good, but it just isn't that engaging. It tries too hard to be quirky and strange, but it comes off as annoying and repetitive more often than not.
I feel bad being so critical of this novel, because it's not irredeemable or doesn't do anything offensively bad with what it's working with, it just commits the sin of being a excellent idea with subpar execution that ends up being boring, and sometimes something being bad is better than being boring. Apologies to my friends who really love this novel, I just couldn't stand it at some point.
PS: I realised I never mentioned this and am adding it retroactively, I am not a prude when it comes to gore or really violent media, I lap up the saw franchise as one of my favourites despite how dumb and excessive it is, but even I found the amount of time spent on the gore and violence in this to be excessive to a point it's a little uncomfortable. The last 20ish pages are the worst offender of this for sure, as It felt like it just went on and on and on, and it felt like the author was really, REALLY proud of this moment for how "earned"(?) it was, but it came off as really childish and strange.