Ironic Contradictions

Whenever I have something to write for university, for personal entertainment or as a review I always start at a basic idea. A single question or thought that I can grow my writing from organically. Sometimes it could be a question such as 'what if Mondays became Tuesdays?' My answer, we'd want Tuesdays to become Wednesdays and so on until we had nothing left but Sundays. In this case as I come back and write this review of a book read years ago my question is: Is Alice in Wonderland really a children's novel?

The reason I ask this is not to question what the genre of this book really is. I merely wonder if Alice in Wonderland is more adult than we realise when often it's thought of as simply a children's novel. After all it has an exceedingly childish character, language which children find easy enough to read and plenty of magical fairytale characters. However it also has suggested implications of hallucinations, insane characters and features plenty of wordplay that is certainly over children's heads (and precisely not how to teach them to write). Clearly I benefited a lot from reading this as a child (drugs, insanity, strange friends? - nothing speaks about me more).

One day I will re-read this and answer my question satisfactorily. And in greater depth. But for now I'm simply content to live in wonder. Maybe I'll add this to my fictional list of books that are 'for children' but not to be read by children. Peter Pan might have to feature too along with Dr Seuss...