Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There is Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, read slowly and softly for sleep.

On a quiet afternoon, Alice notices that the mirror above her fireplace has turned soft as mist. She climbs through it into a backwards world, where clocks and books run the wrong way and even the garden flowers can talk back. Outside, she finds the countryside laid out like a giant chessboard, cut into square fields by little brooks and hedges. Alice learns she is a pawn in this strange game, and if she can only cross the board to the eighth square, she will become a queen herself.

Her journey there is anything but straight. She rides a train that jumps whole squares in a single bound, argues with the twin brothers Tweedledee and Tweedledum over a rattle and a fallen crow, and shares a careful, riddling conversation with Humpty Dumpty on his wall. A gentle, clumsy White Knight rescues her from the Red Knight and rides beside her, forever falling off his horse and inventing odd little devices. Two bickering queens, one red and one white, test her patience and her manners as the eighth square draws near.

This is nonsense literature at its purest, full of wordplay, backwards logic, and a chess game come to life. It sits alongside the great whimsical fantasies of its era, made for listeners who love Wonderland's talking creatures and topsy-turvy rules, or anyone who enjoys Victorian fairy tales built on riddles and puns.

Elizabeth Grace reads in a slow, unhurried voice, letting each strange encounter settle before the next. There's no rush to reach the eighth square — close your eyes, let the chessboard countryside blur at the edges, and fade out before Alice ever becomes a queen.