{Synopsis} – Sixteen-year-old Alice just can't find a way to be free. Her parents are environmental activists whose cringeworthy public protests might involve chaining themselves to a fence and pleading with passersby to “Save the World. Save Alice!” It’s not that Alice doesn’t believe there’s work to be done. But after a petition to start a farmers’ market meets with more snickers than signatures, she figures she should shut up instead of speak out. At least, that is, until she can find something that feels real. Then along comes Whitney Lapin, a girl who speaks in cryptic riddles and spends her free time turning abandoned warehouses into beautiful gardens. Charismatic Whitney leads Alice on a rabbit trail into the underground—a.k.a. secret society—of Wonderland High.
Curiouser and curiouser. Alice is in wonderland! Even though Whitney’s group of teenage environmental vigilantes operates on the wrong side of the law, with them, Alice is finally free to be herself. She stomps on her good-girl image by completing a series of environmental pranks to impress the new group: flooding the school and disguising a pig as a baby in order to smuggle it out of a testing facility. She wants to trust them, and she especially wants to trust (or maybe kiss) Chester Katz—a boy with a killer smile, a penchant for disappearing, and a secret that will really turn Alice’s world backwards. But then one of the young vigilantes tries to frame Alice for all the pranks, and she must figure out their secret before she ends up in front of a jury that’s screaming, “Off with her head!”
{My thoughts} – Alice is a teenage girl that seems to have her thought perception of life a tad skewed due to the impact her parents life choices had on her own life.
Alice’s parents took part in eco-terrorist protests trying to improve the township in which they lived. One night they were on the way to a protest when they crashed and inevitably didn’t survive. After that Alice’s sister became her main care provider and was forced to grow up faster then normal and get a job so that she could attempt to give Alice a chance at a better life.
Alice decides that she wants to follow in her parents footsteps. She does this by carrying out small under the radar protests around school and the township. Eventually she learns she can’t do it alone and she inquires the help of her three of her classmates Whitney, Kingston and Chess. They seem to have been doing their own eco-terrorist protests and she’d finally learned that they were her ticket to getting her point across to the township and those living within it.
While Alice is helping them she learns so many things that are difficult to process. What is it that she and her new friends do to help the town understand that things need to be changed? What is it about her new friends that makes her protests so much more worth doing? How does she and her new friends get along? How does her sister feel about everything that has been going on with Alice? Do Alice and her friends prove to the township and the people that things need to be changed?
I suppose to find out you’ll need to read the book. I recommend this books for those that enjoy retellings of classic stories. It isn’t clear at the beginning which character is suppose to be who in the Alice story, but once you read for awhile it begins to make a lot more sense to the reader. I personally have not read the original Alice story but I have seen the movies and read many different retellings of it. I may need to read the original after reading this book though!
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
