Down the Rabbit Hole

I'm back! With a book! Isn't it funny how whenever you think you've hit the drought of a lifetime, bookwise, you suddenly stumble into a patch of really really really good stuff?

Well, that's how it always happens to me.

Book: Down the Rabbit Hole
Author: Peter Abrahams
Published: 2005

Ingrid Levin-Hill should be over the moon. She’s gotten the part of Alice in the stage version of Alice in Wonderland. But it's hard to concentrate on the stage when a woman named Cracked-Up Katie is murdered right after Ingrid was in her house. And when she mounts her own personal investigation, she keeps coming up with questions instead of answers. What's with her parents lately? Who is this guy, Vincent Dunn, and why did he come to Echo Falls? What really happened to Cracked-Up Katie's fiance? Is she ever going to find the end of this rabbit hole?

It’s no coincidence that Ingrid is playing Alice. Abrahams expertly captures the strange, senseless feel of Carroll's classic. There are a lot of loose threads that exist simply as loose threads. They may or may not be connected. They may be connected, but we don’t know how. I finished the book unsure about whether this was Abrahams not bothering to tie it all together, but the sheer volume of these loose ends makes me think this was his way of making Ingrid’s world Wonderlandish, where things happen for seemingly no reason and with no discernable effect.

It’s tempting (and human) to wish for all of them to be wrapped up, for her parents’ behavior, her brother’s, her grandfather’s, to be explained. But that would have been too pat. Life is a bundle of loose ends, after all, as Alice and Ingrid both learn.

Pick up Down the Rabbit Hole for a challenging, twisty mystery about a sane girl in a crazy world.