If you got winded just from reading that very long, wordy title, you may be surprised to learn that it’s this quirky, Victorian chapter-summary style of title, that first drew me to this book. I liked the pretentious phrasing and long word (mainly “circumnavigated”) for a middle-grade book. It gives it that “I want to sound more grown-up by using big words” kind of feeling. Unfortunately, I was much less enchanted by the story itself than I was with the title. You may at least be comforted to know that the tone of the book pretty well reflects this same tongue-in-cheek voice, with a fourth-wall breaking narrator who provides occasional asides and comments alongside detailed and offbeat descriptions. I thought it was going to read more like Harry Potter in style and tone, but it quickly became obvious that this story was highly derived from (and therefore more closely aligned with) Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (See, I went for the more pretentious full title rather than the more commonly-used Disney version!).

As in Carroll’s classic, this story is also about a girl (this one named September), who wants to escape her life. For September, her escape from the unbearable dreariness of doing the dishes, is facilitated by flying with the Green Wind on the back of a flying leopard to Fairyland. Similar to Alice, September meets many odd, absurd characters along the way, and she learns to understand and fit in with these other characters from her very mundane, real-world perspective. There’s even a Disney-esque element: cute, inanimate objects as sidekicks, such as a fiercely loyal and eager-to-please green smoking jacket. I enjoyed a lot of the ideas and concepts behind these characters, all so quirky (there’s that word again), but I found the story and plot rather forgettable: in fact, with each new encounter, I found I had already forgotten the previous one (which is not uncommon for someone suffering from my chronic condition of booknesia, but still was happening a lot more severely with this book).

Another similarity to Carroll’s Wonderland was the way characters’ roles or nature were almost never relevant to how they acted or what they did. Neither the March Hare nor the White Rabbit actually did anything that rabbits do (or even animals, for that matter), and whatever a hatter normally does, I’m betting that it wasn’t having a tea party. September meets a couple of witches, cutely named Hello and Goodbye, with their shared husband (at which I arch my eyebrow) Manythanks. Even though they are standing around a cauldron and claim to see the future, in chatty conversation with September, they are more preoccupied with describing what witches like them do not do, and with the recovery of a spoon that is now in the possession of the villainous Marquess (who doesn’t sound like an actual noblewoman).

I don’t have too much more to say about this book, except that I enjoyed the writing insofar as the tone — a dry British wit — is very much my kind of thing (even though it’s American and September is from Omaha, Nebraska). Sadly, reading this book not only failed to make me want to read further adventures of September in Fairyland — though that doesn’t mean I won’t — it also made me question how much I ever really loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the first place.

3 stars

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