Journeying to strange worlds in the footsteps of Alice

[AK]

Catherynne M. Valente's love of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll is evident in the first book in a trilogy about a girl named September who travels to Fairyland. I will admit to having an 'on off' relationship with the Alice books myself, and indeed experienced the same reaction to The Girl who Circumnavigated.... where I felt at times that the story got lost in the author's need to be clever.

Having said that, I would share this book with KS2 and explore the nature of absurdity with them (e.g. the Wyvern -a sort of dragon - thinks that its mother was a Wyvern and its father was a public library) and save it until after we had read Alice in Wonderland. The class could construct our own version of Fairyland (full of absurdity) and produce maps and 'non-fiction' texts (perhaps looking at the Land of Neverbelieve by Norman Messenger to play with setting and story.