Unfortunately, she has a lot of her sister in her and is determined to find out who this mysterious Alice is, even if it leads her down a dark and magical path of her own.įollowing this, in ‘Girl In Amber’ we learn that Alice is in fact alive, having escaped the fire in the Asylum along with her companion Hatcher, and that the two of them have fled the city to find a new life for themselves. But all this is kept hidden from Elizabeth. Elizabeth seems to be something of a replacement for the Hargreaves’ banished Alice, and we learn that the asylum burnt down and all inside believed dead. Over the course of the story we learn that Elizabeth is in fact the younger sister of Alice, who was sent away to the city asylum following her magical adventures. What turns this normal day unusual for her is when her appearance seems to spark a secret that her parents are keeping from her when her mother looks as her and says she looks like Alice. The first section of the book, titles ‘Lovely Creature’ follows Elizabeth Hargreaves, a young girl getting ready to celebrate Giving Day, a special occasion where the children of the richer inhabitants of The City meet the City Fathers and receive a small gift from them. Instead, the book has four connected short stories that act as both sequel and prequel to her books Alice and Red Queen, Henry’s version of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Looking Glass isn’t quite what I was first expecting, however, as it’s not a novel in the traditional sense. As such, when the chance to read her latest book came along I jumped at it, eager to see more. I knew that she took existing stories like Peter Pan, or old fairy tales and put new and interesting twists on them, something that I’d seen her do with short stories in anthology collections like Hex Lifeor Cursed: An Anthology of Dark Fairytales, where I was impressed with her work. I’ve seen Christina Henry books numerous times before, books like The Mermaidand The Girl In Red, but never picked any up to read.

The mermaid christina henry summary