Through the Broken Mirror with Alice: Including Parts of Through the Looking-Glass

by Maia Wojciechowska

A black girl, unable to cope with the harsh realities of life in Harlem, turns to the fantasy world of Alice in Wonderland

125 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1972

About the author

Maia Wojciechowska was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1927, and later lived in France and England. Eventually, her family moved to the United States.

A writer of books for young readers, in 1964 Maia Wojciechowska wrote the book "Shadow of a Bull", which was named the Newbery Medal winner in 1965.

In 2002 she died of a stroke in Long Beach, New Jersey. She was seventy-four years old.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early one Sunday morning a little girl is abruptly thrown out of her 12th foster home. She has nothing with her but a copy of Alice in Wonderland borrowed from the library and her only friend, a bee that lives in her head. Is a buzzy and bossy bee better than nothing?

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

1972. This awesome book was marred by didacticism and preachiness, somewhat. It's about a twelve-year-old black girl in Harlem who is thrown out of her twelfth foster home for breaking a mirror. All she has with her is a library copy of Through the Looking Glass. She kind of hallucinates her way through two days of horrors, pretending that she's in a giant chess game at the end of which she will become a queen. Her grip on reality is very tenuous and it seems like it's better that way. The local drug pusher is trying to get her to deal for him, live with him or take heroin. Race seems to define her reality and she seems to be saying I just want to be a little girl. I don't want to be defined as black, as either bad or stupid or less than or having to 'know my place'. I'm just me. The bits about race are the didactic bits. I think if the author had gone more free-form or stream-of-consciousness with it and not butted in with the moralizing, it could have been quite brilliant. But she would put long expositions into the mouths of grown-up characters, as if she believed that her audience really was too dumb to get it otherwise. A major short-coming.

One awesome part is a reinterpreting of Jabberwocky as the white man's code for how horrible 'those people' are. Really far-fetched, but hilarious.