Alice in Blunderland: an Iridescent Dream (version 2)

John Kendrick Bangs takes Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice and drops her into something far stranger than Wonderland: Blunderland, a mirror-world where city politics reign supreme and nothing, absolutely nothing, functions as it should. Accompanied by the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Cheshire Cat, Alice navigates a realm of bureaucratic absurdity where common sense has been exiled and lunacy runs the government. Bangs, the creator of Bangasian Fantasy and a master of satirical wit, transforms Carroll's dreamlike nonsense into something sharper: a pointed comedy of errors that skewers the follies of municipal governance with gleeful precision. The characters Alice knows so well have returned, but they've grown unexpectedly political, and Blunderland's iridescent chaos proves far more dangerous than any tea party. This is satire that wears its humor lightly, letting the laughs land while the observations about power, incompetence, and institutional madness sink in. For readers who loved Carroll's original and for anyone who has ever watched government at its most absurd and thought, this cannot be real.