Seventeen-year-old Alice enters Wonderland through the Looking Glass, a "midtown Atlanta dive" bar tended by "a mousy girl" who takes "more naps than she [mixes] drinks." Once in Wonderland, Alice takes on the role of Dreamwalker: she finds and destroys Nightmares (physical manifestations of bad dreams that feed off of fear and anger) before they can cross into the human world. Lately, there have been more Nightmares than usual, and Alice learns it is because the Atlanta police shot an innocent black girl. This incident is enough to make Alice hang up her daggers for good, but before she can officially quit, she must return to the "realm of dreams" one more time to save her mentor.
Rather than completely re-imagine Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, L.L. McKinney pays homage to the classic fantasy series by including familiar elements and characters, like the Tweedles who, in this urbanized version, are "tall, teenage versions of Spike from Buffy [who] sometimes pull... dumbass pranks." McKinney's debut doesn't ignore the fact that Alice is a teenager, and a black teenager at that--meaning, as episodes in Wonderland intensify, her later nights and longer times away from home anger her mom and cause rifts in her friendships. Additionally, being best friends with a white girl presents its own set of problems, like how Alice needs to remind Courtney that instead of being "a black Buffy," she could be "just Buffy." McKinney's ability deftly to balance Alice's fantastical world of fear-slaying with the modern-day life of a black teenager is admirable. A Blade So Black is a modernized version of a well-known story that retains enough of the original to be lauded by both fans of the classic and readers wholly new to Wonderland. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader