Alice's Second Trip to Wonderland by Charles Lewis Dettering ISBN: 978-1-934209-46-6 Author Charles Lewis Dettering dedicates his book, Alice's Second Trip to Wonderland, to "the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and to everyone in the world who has wished that his tales had not ceased and the adventures of Alice would continue." In this work of fantasy that has striking parallels to the real world, Alice is now 19 years old, a student at Wedgepeth College. Still a believer in what most folks consider impossible, she takes a trip to a far different Wonderland than before: this time, it appears, via a black hole. Arriving in a country that is primarily a racecourse, she experiences new adventures and encounters a variety of characters even more fascinating than she did in her childhood: an ebunnyonics-talking Brown Rabbit who is the "greatest journalist in the world," Humpty Dumpty the 600th, the Flowers of the World, a cockney dodo bird, a foul-mouthed parrot, and a Joker sentenced to death for his refusal to stop punning. The highlight of the story is, arguably, the most hilarious court trial in the history of literature. This book is illustrated with a few of Sir John Tenniel's drawings for the original Alice in Wonderland and new scenes and characters - plus a rare photo of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/aka Lewis Carroll holding hands on a London street with his frequent companion, little Alice Liddell, whom he made famous with his stories about her trips down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass. If you liked Lewis Carroll's childhood Alice stories, you will love this mature Alice tale still more. It is full of the kind of apparent "nonsense" in Carroll's work that had a certain amount of symbolism to it, but always was too esoteric and is now mostly irrelevant. The messages in this story of an Alice trip into a new wonderland retain the subtlety of a Carroll tale, but the satire in it produces more relevance to the present day, and is a whole lot funnier, than what you find in his Victorian era fantasies. I love the cover, the racecourse analogy, and Humpty Dumpty the 600th. The play on ebonics is very clever --Peggy Nash, Professor of Psychology, Broward College Though this new Alice tale will be considered as fantasy, the kind of world and the characters in it come across as all too real, but a whole lot funnier. I made the mistake of beginning to read it just before bedtime. Once I started I could not stop reading and laughing. It cost me a lot of sleep. --Michael C. Pantazis, President, Tembeles Real Estate As a journalist I covered a lot of funny court trials, but none equal to the humor in the trial of Alice. Anyone but a judge or lawyer (guess why) will laugh her or his head off, even while the Queen demands that the head of Alice be taken off in a different manner, for the dissection of this strange creature identifying herself as a member of the "Hu" species or, as the Dodo bird says it, a "hooman bean." The only one in the courtroom who seems to be able to get it right is the Brown Rabbit, covering the trial as "the greatest journalist in the world." Though he thinks Alice has her identification backwards in calling herself a "hu-man," since she is obviously a female, the Brown Rabbit accepts the term and, since it has never been defined before, gives it the definition in his working pocket dictionary as "a freak of nature." --Burton H. Wolfe, author of Pileup on Death Row and No Lawyer Necessary