This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl’s pangs of first love and independence. Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers–precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretches back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s … Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.
When her mother’s mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice’s tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice’s mistakes and save her family. She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.
Read all the books in the New York Times bestselling Splintered series: Splintered (Book 1), Unhinged (Book 2), Ensnared (Book 3), and Untamed (The Companion Novel).
Get books 1 through 3 in the Splintered boxed set, available now!
Praise for Splintered:
STARRED REVIEW
“Fans of dark fantasy, as well as of Carroll’s Alice in all her revisionings (especially Tim Burton’s), will find a lot to love in this compelling and imaginative novel.”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“Alyssa is one of the most unique protagonists I’ve come across in a while. Splintered is dark, twisted, entirely riveting, and a truly romantic tale.”
—USA Today
“Brilliant, because it is ambitious, inventive, and often surprising — a contemporary reworking of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’’ with a deep bow toward Tim Burton’s 2010 film version.”
—The Boston Globe
“It’s a deft, complex metamorphosis of this children’s fantasy made more enticing by competing romantic interests, a psychedelic setting, and more mad violence than its original.”
—Booklist
” Protagonist Alyssa…is an original. Howard’s visual imagination is superior. The story’s creepiness is intriguing as horror, and its hypnotic tone and setting, at the intersection of madness and creativity, should sweep readers down the rabbit hole.”
—Publishers Weekly
“While readers will delight in such recognizable scenes as Alyssa drinking from a bottle to shrink, the richly detailed scenes that stray from the original will entice the imagination. These adventures are indeed wonderful.”
—BookPage
“Attention to costume and setting render this a visually rich read…”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Wonderland is filled with much that is not as wonderful as might be expected, and yet, it is in Wonderland that Alyssa accepts her true nature. The cover with its swirling tendrils and insects surrounding Alyssa will surely attract teen readers who will not disappointed with this magical, edgy tale.”
—Reading Today Online
“Creepy, descriptive read with a generous dollop of romance.”
—School Library Journal
Award:
YALSA’s 2014 Teens’ Top Ten
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Oof. I love stories that deal with mental health, I love fairy-tale retellings, I love Alice in Wonderland stories most of all, and to read a book that supposedly marked all my boxes only to find myself disappointed in every aspect was a real bummer. There’s a lot of things in this novel that marks it down as that particular brand of early 2010s young adult, but I’ve read some great stories filled with familiar tropes, ones that were nothing like this.
Splintered is the first in a series but could functionally stand on its own if you don’t care too much about a minor cliffhanger. Like a lot of Alice in Wonderland retellings, it centers around a supposed descendant of Alice Liddell, a very real young girl that the original Alice in Wonderland is allegedly based off of, Alyssa Gardener. Alyssa is your typical not-like-other-girls protagonist: she’s a skateboarder with an alternative style and colored hair, she works at a vintage store decried as gross by the resident popular girls, her longtime crush is dating a richer, prettier girl than her. All of her problems are compounded by the fact that her mother is in the local asylum, suffering from Wonderland-related psychosis that Alyssa has secretly been suffering from too: she can hear plants and insects talking to her. All of this changes when her mother reveals the source of their psychosis is a curse originating in Wonderland, and so she embarks on a trip to free their family before her mother begins electroshock treatment, which might actually kill her.
There is a lot going on up there.
To establish Alyssa’s life in the real world, the author relies a lot on the fact that everyone in town is horrible but her and her crush, that all the girls around her are evil bitches, and that Alyssa is the only real, genuine girl in town, with the minor exception of a coworker. Not only does the misogyny leap out, but it’s just really unrealistic. The idea that everyone in town has latched onto the fact that her mother is mentally ill and rips her apart for it all day long is absurd. I could’ve understood if maybe everyone in town treated her a little oddly, or more carefully, or even gave her a wide berth, but that everyone is so ungodly malicious that they all call her names and insult her all day long? Also the “asylum” is called just that and seems to have been ripped from the mid-1800s, with malicious and evil nurses who terrorize the patients in front of their families and openly practice electroshock therapies on nonviolent patients. I know it’s a young adult novel and I wasn’t expecting a fully accurate and detailed depiction of mental health services, but everything about the world establishment here is so cartoonishly villainous it was hard to take Alyssa’s problems seriously at all.
The plot is also just seriously confusing. Alyssa goes on this journey because she realizes she’s sharing the same delusions as her mother, which means… that her mother isn’t actually crazy and suddenly reveals a dramatic family curse? When she makes it into Wonderland, accompanied by her crush, Jeb, the plots twist even more: constant backstabbing and trickery, I was never quite sure what the goal was, a series of hastily-done worldbuilding rules that seemed to contradict with each other and changed constantly. There were parts where I finally grasped what was happening and what the goal was only to suddenly shift gears or for a character to randomly show up and have the group change tracks. We follow a love triangle between a guy who’s dating one of the aforementioned popular girls and a mysterious Wonderland creature, neither of which seemed like good options. I spent most of the romantic scenes wondering why either man was even remotely attractive to Alyssa. I know Alice in Wonderland is famous for its absurdity and nonsense, but it still followed a mostly linear plot and was simple enough to understand that it’s a classic for children. This novel is absurd in all the wrong ways.
There was also some pretty suspicious racial things happening. The entire cast is white, which is eye-rolling and annoying but I can’t say I expected anything different, but the author then compounds it by having Alyssa wear dreadlocks and comparing some weird sexual dance she does on a table (again, for nonsense reasons) to a Native American rain dance? Alyssa’s virginity is a hot topic. I know this book was written in 2012 and we weren’t having conversations about racial dynamics and sensitivity readers quite so openly, but even when I was writing admittedly terrible YA novels at the ripe age of ten, I knew better than that.
So why two stars and not one? The author had some good scenes. I didn’t loathe the whole book, which is what I save one-star ratings for. Some of the things she did with Wonderland were original: the caterpillar character was moth-based and had some twisty motivations, the woman who replaced the Red Queen in this narrative could’ve easily been vilified and instead was actually one of the more interesting characters, and the last few chapters of the novel grants more sympathy to their female characters than the setup did. Alyssa does seem to have grown a little from the foot-stomping not-like-other-girls person she started out as, and while I maintain beginning a novel with such an aggravating character wasn’t a good move, I’m glad to see that she didn’t stay that way. I hope this means the sequels (which I am still planning on reading, I bought the whole series like five years ago in an optimistic moment and can’t bear to leave books unread) will show more maturity, and now that the world is established maybe the author can stop messing with it every five seconds.
I might already own the whole series, but if you’re thinking about starting a new series, pick another. There are plenty of better fairy-tale novels out there, and countless Alice in Wonderland film/TV series adaptations if you’re looking to scratch a specific itch. Splintered didn’t really do it for me, although I’ll come back to edit this if the sequels surprise me by being better.
review blog
A dark, whimsical retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story with a unique and endearing love story. The world building is poetic and vivid.
Amazing book recommend if you like a little Of ever
I loved everything about this book! (Especially Morpheus, but don’t get me started.) It takes you on an fun, dangerous adventure brimming with magic!
i really like this book i just really wish i could read it again
I checked this book out with Libby and listened to the audio book. One thing, right off the bat, this could be a stand alone. You’re not going to be left at the end hating life because you don’t have book two. That being said, I still want to read book two very badly.
Imagine a world in which, Lewis Carrol heard all about Wonderland from the real Alice. Now, imagine that each of her descendants are cursed. That’s kind of what this book is, and yet not really! In the true style of Wonderland, what you thought it was, it wasn’t. In any case, following Alyssa through her travels with a unwell mother, a neighbor she’d like to be something more, and a childhood friend she thought was a dream, you will be nothing less than enthralled with every turn of the page. There are adventures and deception and even romance… including a bit of a triangle. I just could not stop listening!
At the end of the book, there is a sense of resolution and completion, which is why I said at the beginning that the anxiety that normally attacks at the end of a book one, is not quite as strong with this one. But knowing there are more is a gift. I can’t wait to get back into the world of Splintered!
Alyssa’s mother was put into an asylum because the bugs and flowers began to talk to her. Now they are whispering into Alyssa’s ear as well. She’s afraid to tell anyone, but when she visits her mother and they both hear the cut flower’s words, things start to change. Alyssa will find that her mother hasn’t been raving about Wonderland. It’s all true. Her family is cursed and to free her mother, she must journey to Wonderland and undo the mistakes of her ancestor Alice.
Splintered is a macabre retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Everything you’ve come to know and love from the story has been twisted. The white rabbit is a skeleton with a flesh eating disease, and wait until you see what they do at a feast. The word twinkle will never mean the same thing to me again. But the story is just as beautiful as it is brutal and I loved every single minute of it.
If you don’t have a taste for morbid or grisly tales, steer clear of this story. It is darkly seductive and will keep you on your toes with each new introduction to the ever increasing world-building. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Rebecca Gibel and she brought a whole new level to the characters with her wonderful voice acting.
The descriptions and scene setting are so well detailed, heightening the overall darkness and tone of Splintered. There is also a nice subplot of romance woven into the dark depths. While I generally don’t like reading about love triangles, this was one I enjoyed. There’s magic, mystery, and a lure of personalities I couldn’t ignore. Definitely a series I will be continuing.
my favorite series ever
A.G Howard is the best writer ever, I love all of her work!! splintered sits on my side table so that I can pick it up when ever to read it! If you read this book you will fall in love!
The side of you you keep locked and hidden because people won’t understand. And if you let them in they’d call you crazy but you’re not crazy. Just the opposite, you’re perfect just the way you are. If only someone else could see it. Straight into your soul and who you were always meant to be.
Actual Rating 3.75
Splintered was a very fun twist on Alice in Wonderland and even pays homage to quite a few children’s stories. Splintered was very fun, adventurous, and held bit of mystery. I really liked all the characters. Morpheus was probably my favorite character. He is such a mystery and his motives are always questionable. You never know if his intentions are pure or if they’re for selfish reasons. The relationship he shares with Alyssa was complicated and his feelings towards were murky most of the time, but I really couldn’t help loving him. Alyssa was a great main character that I really liked. Her intentions were pure and I loved this wild quest she was on. Jeb was also really great and I thought Howard did a wonderful job with his character as Alyssa’s love interest and best friend. It was clear that he really loved and cared for Alyssa and he didn’t hesitate to show that with his actions.
Wonderland was so magical, dangerous, and just so much fun to read about. I fell in love with this world Howard created that is in many ways like Carroll’s Wonderland, but at the same time Howard created a whole new world of her own. Splintered is a fantastic book especially for those Alice in Wonderland fans.
Very interesting and perfect combo of morbid and romantic. Gives that special, almost strange, feeling and I loved every bit of it!
The whole series keept me on the edge. After i reread it to remind me, how everything is all a matter of perception.
Liked it so much I bought the rest of the series. Great characters and story.
A wonderfully dark re-imagining of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Splintered’ introduces the descendant of Alice, Alyssa. Obsessed with insects and flowers that she swears can talk, and with her mother in a mental institution, she has carefully hidden the truth from her father: that she believes she has inherited her mother’s insanity. But things are not as they seem, as memories that she didn’t know she had starts bubbling to the surface of her mind.
With all the other things going on in her life, she soon finds herself trapped in a love triangle between her best friend Jeb and the mysterious Morpheus. Down the rabbit hole she tumbles, and finds that the Wonderland in the book isn’t quite what Carroll wrote about, full of dark creatures and malevolent beings, some of which want her dead. Why did Morpheus summon her to Wonderland? Is her family really cursed? Or are there more secrets?
This book is definitely not for everybody. It is full of grotesque descriptions, and there is a bit of romance in there. If you enjoy gritty stories with a dark twist, you’ll love ‘Splintered’ but if you’re squeamish, I suggest the original.
I’m a huge fan of retellings. This is a fantastic spin on Alice in Wonderland.
I loved this re-imagining of the Alice In Wonderland story. It’s more of a return to wonderland. Parts moved a little slow for me, but that didn’t curb my overall enjoyment in the least. I’ll definitely be reading the others in the series.
This AiW series is EVERYTHING.
Ev.Ree.Thang.
Read it.
Writing: 5 Stars;
Characters: 5 Stars;
Plot: 5 Stars;
Entertaining: 5 Stars;
Read Again? Maybe.
Total: 5 Stars
I have enjoyed this fantasy related to Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland very much. It is a punky, dark world that is both beautiful and terrifying. Imagining the creatures — “shudder” — I would not want to find my way into Wonderland. It is also a surprisingly deeply moving story. It’s creepy, colorful, seductive, and sexy.
I’m nervous to read the second book in the series, because this one ends so well. I think this novel can stand alone. After finishing the other books I’ll let you know if it should.
I borrowed the audiobook from the Toronto Public Library. Excellent performance. Love the cover art.
I love this book it’s such a good book to read I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves Retailing’s