A Blade So Black (Nightmare-Verse, #1)

English language

ISBN:
978-1-250-15390-6
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4 stars (3 reviews)

A Blade So Black is a young adult fantasy novel written by L.L. McKinney and volume 1 of The Nightmare-Verse series. It is a contemporary re-imagining of the Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a black teenage girl protagonist. A Blade So Black was released on September 25, 2018 by Imprint/Macmillan.

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Review of 'A Blade So Black (Nightmare-Verse, #1)' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

A Blade So Black uses Wonderland to magically embody community trauma and personal grief. Moving beyond a simple retelling, it is referential instead of a replication. It is the terror of a Nightmare made flesh with blades strong enough to fight it.

When adapting or re-interpreting well-known source material like the collection of books and poems by Lewis Carroll which are often known collectively as "Alice in Wonderland", it can be difficult to find a balance between leveraging that background knowledge and building a new understanding of that world. I love adaptations of this world in particular, and I love how this version turned out. The characters are referential rather than just copying the source material, the history and current state of Wonderland are explained sufficiently for readers who might be unfamiliar with the original (or who are perhaps more familiar with some of the famous adaptations), and overall I …

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3 stars
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4 stars