In this book, Lewis Carroll, a big fan of puzzles, paradoxes and “shifters,” the author of the already famous “Alice in Wonderland,” sends her beloved heroine girl Alice to another fabulous country - Through the Looking Glass.
Like last time, Alice embarks on an adventure thanks to her curious and cute animal - a black kitten with whom she plays half asleep. And on the other side of the magical mirror facet, various miracles and transformations begin.
Alice appeared to be in exactly the same room with a blazing fireplace, but the portraits there were whispering about something, the clock smiled broadly, and near the fireplace Alice saw many small, but lively chess pieces. There they walked and talked in a dignified manner, obviously not noticing the appearance of Alice, the Black King and the Black Queen, the White King and the White Queen, Rooks and Pawns.
And when the girl picked up the king and cleaned it from ash, he was so frightened by this intervention of an incomprehensible invisible force that, by his own admission, he went cold to the ends of the whiskers, which the Black Queen did not fail to notice, he did not have at all. And even when the smart little Alice realized how to read poems written in a completely incomprehensible way in this country and brought the book to the mirror, the meaning of the poem still somehow slipped away, although it was felt that a lot of the acquaintance was in the words and the events were depicted amazing.
Alice really wanted to explore an unusual country, but it was not easy to do it: no matter how she tried to climb the top of the hill, she again appeared at the entrance to the house from which she had left. After talking with flowers that were very lively on the tongue, growing nearby in the flowerbed, Alice heard unusual advice: to go in the direction opposite to the goal. Seeing the Black Queen, Alice did just that and, to her own amazement, met her at the foot of a previously unattainable hill. It was then that Alice noticed that the country was partitioned into neat cages with hedges and streams - neither give nor take a chessboard. And Alice really wanted to take part in this chess game, even as a pawn; although most of all, of course, she wanted to become Queen. But in chess, if you try very hard, a pawn can become a queen. The Black Queen even told her how to get to the eighth line. Alice set off on a journey full of surprises and adventures. In this unusual country, instead of bees around Alice, elephants flew, on the train in which Alice found herself, passengers (including Kozel, Zhuk and Horse) presented tickets the size of them themselves, and the Controller looked at Alice for a long time through a telescope, microscope, theater binoculars and finally concluded: "You are going in the wrong direction!" Having approached the stream, the train casually jumped over it (and with it Alice jumped to the fourth line of the chessboard). Then she met so many incredible creatures and heard so many incredible judgments that she could not even remember her own name. Then she did not mind when the Lion with the Unicorn, these fabulous monsters, began to call her Beast, Alice.
On the fourth line, as predicted by the Black Queen, Alice met two fat women, Trulyalya and Tralyalya, who were always arguing and even fighting over trifles. The brawlers pretty much scared Alice: bringing them to the Black King who was sleeping nearby, they said that she only dreamed of him and should the King wake up, like Alice, they themselves and everything around would disappear. Although Alice did not believe them, she did not begin to wake the King and check the words of the twins.
Through-the-mirror life was reflected in everything. The White Queen, who met Alice, promised to treat the girl with jam tomorrow. Alice began to refuse, but the Queen reassured her: tomorrow, anyway, it never really comes, it only comes today, and the jam is promised for tomorrow. Not only that, it turned out that the Queen remembers both the past and the future at once, and when she screamed in pain over her bloodied finger a little later, she still didn’t prick him at all, it happened only after some time. And then, in the forest, Alice could not cut the pie and treat the audience: the pie was growing together all the time; then Leo explained to her that the Mirror Cake should be distributed first, and then cut. Everything happened here contrary to the usual logic, as if backwards.
Ordinary objects also behaved in no way similar to anything. An egg suddenly grew up in front of Alice’s eyes and turned into a round, big-chested man, in which Alice immediately recognized Humpty Dumpty from a famous nursery rhyme. However, a conversation with him put poor Alice in a complete standstill, because even quite familiar words took on unexpected meanings, let alone strangers! ..
This property - to interpret in an unusual way, to turn familiar words inside out - was inherent in almost all the inhabitants of the Looking Glass. When Alice met the White King in the forest and informed him that she did not see anyone on the road, the King envied her: she would have managed to see Nobody; The King himself did not see him.
In the end, Alice reached, of course, the eighth line, where she felt an unusually heavy object on her head - it was a crown. However, the Black and White Queens who appeared soon were still behaving with her like two angry governesses, puzzling the newly-made Queen with their strange logic. And the feast, arranged seemingly in her honor, was also surprisingly strange. Angry Alice attacked the Black Queen, who had turned up under her arm, began to shake her and suddenly found herself holding ... a black kitten. So it was a dream! But whose? The question is still waiting for an answer.
