Product Description

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is Robert Sabuda's most amazing creation ever, featuring stunning pop-ups illustrated in John Tenniel's classic style. The text is faithful to Lewis Carroll's original story, and special effects like a Victorian peep show, multifaceted foil, and tactile elements make this a pop-up to read and admire again and again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20941 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 12 pages

From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 6-Sabuda brings Alice's world to life with breathtaking, three-dimensional images that are incredibly imaginative, intricately detailed, and perfectly executed. Carroll's text has been significantly abridged, and although some scenes are a bit choppy, the quickly paced narrative retains the flavor of the original. Sabuda's illustrations pay homage to John Tenniel's artwork, while providing a fresh look at the story and offering details that add greatly to the reading experience. The events unfold in six glorious spreads, each featuring a large pop-up and a narrow booklet that opens into several pages containing the text as well as additional pop-ups. The first scene depicts Alice and her sister on the riverbank, and the faces of several Wonderland characters are camouflaged among the background trees. A pull-up panel provides a "Victorian peep show" view of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Throughout, shiny foils highlight items such as pots and pans, and felt adds textured detail to the Cheshire Cat and other fuzzy animals. A movable inset transforms the face of the Duchess's offspring from a baby's to a pig's. As a page is turned, a gardener raises his paintbrush and a piece of cellophane changes a white rose to red. In the final spread, a frightened Alice waves her arms beneath a delicate arch of cards. In addition to pulling off feats of paper engineering, the artist also manages to create compositions that provide an eye-pleasing balance of colors, shapes, and action. Much too delicate to circulate, libraries may still want to purchase this book for displays and just for showing off.
Joy Fleishhacker, School Library Journal
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Reviewed with J. Otto Seibold's Alice in Pop-Up Wonderland.

What is it about Alice? This season two well-known children's book creators have tackled the challenge of shoehorning Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into pop-up books only six spreads long. Larded with dioramas, flaps, and other displays of paste-and-paper bravura, both versions are likely to create buzz among Alice collectors and aficionados of movable books. But the two renditions of the same story could hardly be more different.

Seibold's "super dimensional" Alice, which he both designed and illustrated, plunges children into a psychedelic universe straight out of the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." It features Carroll's original text in brief, cherry-picked excerpts, so the finished product is more a series of interpretive highlights than a thorough presentation of the story, and the rococo, tough-to-decipher typeface adds to the impression that the book is meant to be viewed, not read. Seibold's trademark palette of beiges and pea greens, and a slightly grotesque Alice with Ronald McDonald clown feet, seem to dare readers to prefer Disney's prettiness or Tenniel's Victorian placidity. The pops conceived by Seibold and paper engineer James R. Diaz are a lot of fun. Each spread contains a dizzying array of devices and effects, including a particularly clever rendering of the vanishing Cheshire cat. In the end, however, all of this somehow seems less the point than the book's air of hipster irony.

The version by Sabuda, creator of a previous pop-up adaptation of a classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2000), cleaves more closely to the original; its full-color artwork is "in John Tenniel's classic style," and the abridged text, cleverly tucked into minibooks on each spread, is fairly comprehensive. It's also the more successful of the two, partly because this faithfulness preserves the contrast between the drawing-room politeness of Tenniel's illustrations and the lunacy of Carroll's imaginings. Where the pops in Seibold's version creak open a bit grudgingly and sometimes need a hand from the reader to work properly, Sabuda's don't pop so much as gracefully unfurl--and then collapse upon themselves with jaw-dropping ease that leaves one flipping the pages back and forth in amazement. Few readers will peep through the expandable tube that simulates Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole, or admire the closing spread's intricately die-cut, gravity-defying arc of playing cards, without feeling a bit bereft when the adventure comes to an end. This will very likely come to be seen as the definitive pop-up version of Alice, but it will also further establish Sabuda as the foremost visionary of the genre. REVWR
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

amazing
the book is so beautifull, as a huge "alice" fan- its the top of my items!!! its like having something taken out from a museun in my house!i highly recomend

Excellent format for a great story to interest your kids
I purchased this book as the first pop-up book for my three-year old son and two-year old daughter. I knew it could be a risk, due to the fragile nature of pop-up books, however this one is truly a treat for my children, my wife, myself and everyone else who has seen it!

I'd recommend the book (for self-reading) to older children who know how the fragile the pop-ups can be, but if you read to your kids I recommend this to anyone. It's a classic story which inspires a child's imagination and has an excellent graphical presentation of the story which really captures my children's attention while they're read to.

I only gave this book four of five stars due to the small portions through-out most of the book which actually has the written text. These are also created with mini-pop-ups, but are not incorporated into the whole width and length of the book. Instead the main text of the book is grouped into small 3-4 inch wide pages with small text. Not something you want if you read to your children at bedtime with minimal lighting.

However, don't let this prevent you from buying the book! It is worth the price and has some of the most fantastic pop-ups I've ever seen!

Family Treasure
I purchased this book because of the last page. I had seen it at my Book Club and knew my grandchildren would love it. They love peaking down the rabbits hole and finding the additional pop ups on each page. A book you will definately want to pass on down the family. Truly a classic come to life.