Alice I Have Been: Melanie Benjamin

WOW. This book really captured the narrator's voice and feeling, which made me very emotional reading it. Possibly because Alice Liddell's life seemed similar to a grandmothers, who just passed away last week. Both had great expectations for life, but it was full or heartbreak and disappointment. Back to the book... The novel was about the life of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. The author notes that the book is more fiction than biography because though she did a lot of research into Alice's life, she had to do a lot of piecing together herself. The book largely centered on Alice and her buddy, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the author Lewis Carroll. As a child she was in love with him, but then for reasons she didn't understand, her mother didn't allow him to visit abruptly. She lives the rest of her life wondering why. She knows her relationship with Dodson is strained, but is uncertain why and feels guilty for some reason. The novel has Alice falling in love with Prince Leopold, whose mother won't let him marry a commoner. She loses her favorite sister, Edith, to illness around the same time. Eventually she marries Reginald Hargreaves when she is 28 and has three sons. The two eldest are killed in WWI. At the end of her life once everyone she loves, except her youngest son, are dead she remembers kissing Dodson and it being seen by her oldest sister who turns it into something filthy. I enjoyed the book and was glad it didn't discredit Dodson's name, it still left a lot to speculation and reader interpretation.