I went into this book thinking it was an Alice in Wonderland retelling. I was so wrong in such a good way!
Ali is a smart-mouthed teenager who speaks fluently in sarcasm. She’s a true science nerd who won’t be easily fooled by magic and when she accidentally stumbles into Wonderland, she doesn’t believe it’s real. That is, until Wonderland starts killing her and she needs to decode riddles that were written by her great aunt in the Wonderland books.
I really enjoyed this book. It was fast paced and easy to read. The characters were well developed and the world building was descriptive yet easy to follow (fantasy readers will understand!). I felt that ending was rushed though. This is book one of a series, but it could have ended in a more polished way, in my opinion.
I rated this book 4 stars for the grammatical and wording errors, but I am excited for book two!

Thank you to NetGalley and Martin Baynton for an advanced copy of The Secret of Safe Passage. This review is left honestly and voluntarily.

“The Secret of Safe Passage” was a fun, twisted tale circling the Alice in Wonderland books, which I loved!

So much happened towards the end and so much story left to be told! I need to research when/where the 2nd book in this series is!

Thank you for providing me the opportunity to review "The Secret of Safe Passage”. I am appreciative and leave my review voluntarily….. and request book #2 immediately or “off with someone’s head!”

Thank you NetGalley and Martin Baynton for allowing me to read The Secret of Safe Passage. I received an advanced reader copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I love a good Alice in Wonderland story and this book was truly great. Baynton has a very intriguing style of writing, which kept me riveted all the way through to the end. The characters were highly entertaining and the plot was mysterious. Looking forward to the next book.

(I was given an arc of this book through Netgalley in return for an honest review).
Overall Rating:
-Characters: 2/5
-Plot: 2/5
-Setting: 3/5
-Description: 3/5
-Enjoyment: 2/5
I usually love retellings, especially ones that include my favorite stories like “Alice in Wonderland”, but this one fell short of my expectations. The characters were predictable and the main character’s flat personality hid behind cliche sassy remarks. The premise sounded interesting especially since it involved a modern spin on the story, but the action did not pick up until the second half of the book which made it hard to get into.

I really enjoyed this book! Ali is a interesting and entertaining character and is likable. I loved how this is a spin on the Alice In The Wonderland story and the author did a wonderful job incorporating that into the story. Overall, I would reccommend this book! 10/10! Special Thank You to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review 📚
The Secret of Safe Passage by Martin Baynton - 4/5 ⭐

So we're taking a stroll through a wonderland we already know and love, but thrown in some twists and you've got yourself a book named called The Secret Of Safe Passage! I love a good fairytale twist so I am all over this. I was devastated when it ended but then I jumped for joy when I realised there was going to be a book 2! Thank you Baynton.

Ok so, characters were insane. In a good way obviously, not the psycho kill you way! The personalities and demeanour of each of them was spot on. They were written fantastically so you knew exactly what and who you was reading about. Great description and detail went in to each of them. Ali was easily my favourite, her entire character was perfect.

The story/plot of the book was pretty awesome. A rebellious teenager sets out on a journey that has magic and fantasy twists thrown at her. Phenomenal. It was paced really well and kept me reading, so there isn't much I'd complain about.

Thank you to NetGalley and Book Buzz for allowing me to read this ARC - this is an HONEST review from my own personal opinion.

I both loved and hated this book - loved because it had such a wonderful and intriguing mystery and hated because now I have to wait a year for the sequel! Admittedly, I wasn't expecting to like the story as much as I did - I initially believed this was more of a children's book than general fiction. Still, I was soon proven wrong by the delightfully abrasive character of Ali. There were so many dimensions to her character that it made her feel like a real person, someone I could talk to as a friend rather than a fictional character. The blending of the "real world" with that of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was done brilliantly to such an extent that at one point I sat down and seriously considered if Wonderland (or, at least, someplace like it) could actually exist given what we currently know about gravity wells and the multiverse theory. The only "criticism" I have, if you can even call it that, is the ending of the book. I won't give away any spoilers, I'll just say that it ended very abruptly and although I know that this is the first book in a series, it still felt to me that it was like finishing a TV show episode rather than completing an actual novel. But other than that, and asides from a few very small technicalities that didn't add up for me, it was an interesting and captivating story that I'll definitely be recommending to all my friends!

An enthralling adventure that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. The story follows Ali, a witty and science-loving teenager, as she finds herself in Wonderland, a place she initially denies as real until she faces its deadly threats. The author weaves a captivating narrative filled with riddles and dark forces that Ali must decipher and conquer to ensure her survival. I was drawn to Ali's resilient character and found myself rooting for her at every turn. Baynton's imaginative world-building and the clever incorporation of classic storybooks make this book a must-read for anyone seeking a thrilling and magical journey.

Imagine fairy tales on steroids, but with a dash of scientific curiosity and a strong no-nonsense attitude. I couldn't put this book down as Ali faced dangerous challenges and decoded riddles buried within the very stories we grew up with. It's like someone mixed Alice in Wonderland with a pinch of Nancy Drew and a generous sprinkle of mystery. If you're up for an adventure that will make your heart race and your mind whirl, dive into this book and get ready for the unexpected – it's a wild ride worth taking!

I really enjoyed Talking Wonderland The Secret of Safe Passage by Martin Baynton. The book was built around the stories of Wonderland we already know but then puts a wicked twist to them.

Ali is a rebellious teen who has been suspended from school. She is sent to her estranged Aunt and Uncle’s home to reflect on her behavior. While there she finds that the women in her family line have a special talent—and she has it too.

Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Suspense, Thriller.

I can’t wait for book two in the series: Truth and Transformation.

Thank you Netgalley and Martin Baynton for allowing me to read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

An interesting and original take on the Alice adventures by Lewis Carroll. Ali is suspended from school and sent to live with elderly relatives in the countryside. Here she discovers a portal into Wonderland that had previously been used by her mother and other distant relatives. Getting there is easy but getting back isn't, so Ali sets out, using notes made by her mother and her great-great-aunt, to try to find a safe way of doing this. Others are also interested in accessing Wonderland safely, so Ali has to work secretly and quickly to find out as much as she can.
This is the first book in the series, and is primarily about Ali's search for safe passage. As such, I found it started out well but drifted off the pace as the book progressed. The story, at times, felt rather unpolished.
I didn't like the character of Ali. Others have described her as sassy but for me she is a precocious, irritating, over-confident and arrogant pain. Her elderly relatives, on the other hand, were quite charming characters.
Overall I'd say the book started out well but didn't retain my interest to the end.

I'm finding this a tricky one to rate.

I've read quite a few books lately where the emotional throughline, the story, is handled effectively, but there are significant mechanical issues (the things a copy editor looks after; mostly punctuation, but also things like grammar and tense) and underdeveloped worldbuilding. This is one of those, except that instead of the worldbuilding being undeveloped there are a large number of small errors of continuity and fact. The overall feel, then, is of a story lacking a lot of polish, so much so that I hesitate to add it even to the bottom tier of my recommendation list.

Now, I did get a pre-release version via Netgalley. It's possible - though, honestly, not highly likely - that a skilled copy editor will go through it between the version I saw and the version that's published in about two weeks from now, and fix the two it's/its errors, the many comma splices, the many places where a comma is missing before a term of address, the many places where a question is missing a question mark, the carelessly dropped quotation marks, and the small words from sentences that are missing or substituted for different words. They may even fix up the bits of dialog where the response doesn't match the previous line, like the glaring one where person A describes someone as a "zombie" with no indication of gender, and person B says "Woman?" as if that word had been used in the preceding sentence.

If they're extraordinarily good, they may even fix up the subtle errors, like describing "charm" as a subatomic particle (it's a flavour of quark, which isn't quite the same thing), or claiming that "faster" should be corrected to "more quickly" when both are acceptable, or Ali saying that she was a blood donor several years before, even though she's 15 and the minimum age for blood donation in the UK is 17.

What all of that wouldn't fix was the big swallow at the start - in the prologue, in fact - where we get a major revision to well-known history. In reality, Alice Pleasance Liddell was one of three sisters to whom Charles Lutwedge Dodgson, who transformed his first two names to the pseudonym Lewis Carroll via Latin, told the original Alice in Wonderland story, using her name for the protagonist. Alice was, at the time, 10 years old; she lived to the age of 80, marrying and having three children. Dodgson wrote several other works, none of which are as good (especially Sylvie and Bruno, which is awful) or as well known, but which are certainly in a similar style. In this version, Alice Carroll Grey, exact age unspecified, wrote both Alice books herself, filling them with secret messages about a real otherworld, and then disappeared into it after handing them over to Dodgson to be published as being written by him. She had to flee there because the White Rose, a sinister organization, was hunting her in order to get the secret of access to Wonderland (and safe return, which is harder, hence this novel's title). This organization has survived for 170 years since then without apparently achieving very much at all; the operatives are called Knaves and the head of it is Mrs King (i.e., obviously, the White Queen). The original Alice's great-niece (there are probably several more greats, but even if there are there seem to be too few generations mentioned to account for the 170-year gap), also named Alice but going by Ali, discovers and begins decoding the secret when she's manipulated into getting suspended from school and sent to relatives she's never previously heard of at an old country house that's been in the Grey family since her Great-Aunt Alice's time.

Ali is not a nice person. Her mother died on a humanitarian mission when Ali was quite young, her father is away a lot for work (he's a scientist studying gravity waves, which involves being incommunicado in a Faraday cage down a mine in Wales for days at a time), and she's now an angry, stubborn teenager, given to striking out in rage, actual tantrums, and, even when not specifically angry, weaponizing her intelligence to make cruel remarks. Her elderly relatives, who are lovely, do manage to tame her down a bit, and she eventually grows as a person and realizes how awful she's been, but she's still a piece of work. Still, her character and her arc of growth are the best thing about the book, which from my particular perspective is damning it with faint praise, because I prefer, as a matter of taste, to read about people who are actually well-intentioned from the start and not awful. The storytelling and the handling of Alice's character show the skill that is notably lacking in the mechanics, the background, the continuity, and the incidental facts.

So: a very rough piece of work with a main character that I didn't care for. I hovered between three and four stars, and finally landed on three, because I don't recommend it. That isn't to say that someone with different tastes, who doesn't notice the same kinds of issues that distracted me so frequently, won't enjoy it.

A fantastic book. A version of Alice in Wonderland that is almost as imaginative as the original. Highly recommended. The novel is set in modern times and concerns a rebellious teenager. It extends the story of Alice in Wonderland. I cannot reveal any more because I don't wish to spoil the story.