One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll: A Celebration of Wordplay and a Girl Named Alice

Lewis Carroll’s life will be forever synonymous with the glorious whimsy, frivolity, and chaos embodied by his famous works, like the adventures of Alice and the Jabberwocky.

But One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll is the first biography I’ve found that mixes Lewis’s personal journey with the iconic words and phrases he would later make famous. From famous Carroll quotations to the inimitable words like “frabjous” and “uffish” that set your imagination reeling, his life (and lifelong love of all things whimsical) is immortalized for younger readers to discover and enjoy.

Vivid, almost hallucinatory imagery accompanies the reader on this excursion through Carroll’s life and legacy, filling what could’ve been a humdrum tale with all sorts of liveliness. It all builds to his first attempt to tell Alice’s story, making the moment of creation into the heart of the story itself.

The addition of a glossary and a comprehensive mini-biography after the story itself helps ground the book in reality once more after the fun and frantic childlike trip through Carroll’s creative life. One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll is precisely what it promises.