Alice I Have Been: A Novel - Melanie Benjamin

Written by Melanie Benjamin
Read by Samantha Eggar
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: January 12, 2010
Duration: 12:13:31

Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole–and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

In this well-researched novel, Melanie Benjamin uses the freedom of fiction to explore the complicated relationship between Alice Liddell Hargreaves and the man who created her alter ego, Oxford professor Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). Samantha Eggar provides a sympathetic, enlightening narration throughout. Her wonderfully warm, crisp British voice sounds right, and she varies pace and tone beautifully to sustain our interest throughout the book’s captivating, if occasionally overwrought, narrative. Eggar also changes her pitch just enough to let us know when Alice the child versus Alice the adult is speaking–important in this circuitous tale. An altogether beautiful read of an intriguing novel.