Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Take Your Medicine
AUTHOR: Hannah Carmack
PUBLISHER: NineStar Press
LENGTH: 92 pages
RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2018
BLURB:
Alice “Al” Liddell is from Echola, Alabama. She leads the life of a normal teen until the day she’s diagnosed with vasovagal syncope – a fainting disorder which causes her to lose consciousness whenever she feels emotions too strongly.
Her mother, the “Queen of Hearts,” is the best cardiothoracic surgeon this side of the Mason-Dixon Line and a bit of a local hero. Yet, even with all her skill she is unable to cure her daughter of her ailment, leading Al into the world of backwater witchcraft.
Along the way she meets a wacky cast of characters and learns to accept her new normal.
Take Your Medicine is a southern gothic retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
REVIEW:
This story isn’t what I expected it to be upon starting it, but it was still a decent story. It’s a very loose retelling of the Alice In Wonderland in an American South setting that has Alice (“Al” in this case) going down the “rabbit hole” of holistic healing for her vasovagal syncope, a chronic illness that seems to defy all attempts at a cure. Since I have a close friend with this uncommon condition, I was excited to read a book about a girl with VSS.
Al’s quirky relationship with Rabbit, a witch who uses natural remedies and spells to cure small ailments, is very sweet and feels like it progresses naturally. We definitely get that young love, “butterflies in the tummy” feeling as Al falls for a girl for the first time. Since this is such a short story, we don’t get too in-depth with their feelings for one another, but they still have a nice little romance.
I had some issues with certain parallels drawn to original Alice In Wonderland characters. They made some logical stretches that didn’t make sense. I was mostly baffled by the inclusion of Al’s mother, a renowned heart surgeon, as the “Queen of Hearts” counterpart. We all know the Queen of Hearts is the villain of the original Alice In Wonderland, but painting Al’s mother as a villain for being wary of untested holistic treatments wouldn’t be very fair. We get a very brief POV section with her, but it doesn’t establish her as a hero, villain, or anything else. And some of the minor friend characters bear a little resemblance to their classic counterparts (Tiff and Tosh to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, for example), but in name only. Even Kat (the Cheshire cat) and Rabbit (the White Rabbit) don’t go beyond surface level comparisons.
Honestly, this story didn’t even need to be retelling. I would’ve been perfectly content with a story about Al meeting two girls who want to use their witchcraft to heal her without all of the Alice In Wonderland connections. It distracted from a very original type of story.
Even if the elements themselves didn’t really work for me, it’s nice to see a retelling of a popular classic with black folks as the main characters. Alice is commonly known as a blonde, white little girl, but Al in this story is black (born to a wealthy Southern parent), sapphic, and chronically ill. She’s an original character based off someone we all know and love, and that’s harder to do than people realize. Some of the black Southern dialect is a little clunky at times, but it’s not too bad.
If you’re looking for a quick, cute WLW read in a lush Southern setting, this story is a decent choice for a lazy afternoon.
RATING: 
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