Look, I need to lodge a formal complaint. I put this on at 1 AM thinking "dark Alice retelling, should be a fun little bedtime listen" and then Christina Henry decided to take every warm fuzzy Wonderland memory I had and run it through a meat grinder. I did not sleep that night. Not because the book was scary — though it is — but because the Old City Henry builds is so grimy and lived-in that I couldn't stop picking at it like a scab. I got a similar level of urban grit and lived-in detail from Welcome to Lagos: A Novel, though that book replaces fairy-tale monsters with real-world political chaos—the atmosphere is just as relentless.
This Is Not Your Disney Alice (And Thank God)
The Old City is basically what would happen if you dropped Wonderland into a post-apocalyptic urban nightmare and let crime lords carve it into territories. The Rabbit, the Walrus, the Caterpillar — they're all here, but they're gang bosses and traffickers and worse. Henry doesn't build a magic system so much as she builds a power structure, and honestly? It scratches a similar itch. Every chapter peels back another layer of who controls what, who answers to whom, and what the Jabberwock actually is. My D&D group would love this — it reads like the darkest campaign setting your DM was too afraid to run.
Alice herself starts the book as a traumatized woman escaping a mental hospital, and her progression from barely functional to genuinely dangerous is satisfying in that slow-burn way I usually only get from progression fantasy. She doesn't just power up — she remembers. Bits and pieces of what happened at the tea party, what the Rabbit did, what she lost. Each recovered memory comes with a new capability she didn't know she had. It's not Sanderson-level systematized magic by any stretch, but the progression is satisfying in its own feral, fairy-tale-with-teeth kind of way.
Hatch is the other half of this equation — the magician who escapes the hospital with her. His dynamic with Alice walks this knife-edge between protector and something more complicated. He clearly knows more than he's letting on, and Henry lets that tension simmer without rushing it. Good restraint.
Jenny Sterlin Had to Earn My Trust (She Did)
I'm going to be honest. The first 30 minutes, I wasn't sure about Sterlin's narration. Her Alice voice has this breathy, slightly detached quality that felt off to me initially. But here's the thing: Alice is a woman who's been institutionalized for years. She's medicated, traumatized, barely holding it together. That floaty, disconnected delivery? It's not a flaw. It's characterization. By the time Alice starts getting her fight back around the middle chapters, Sterlin shifts with her — the voice gets firmer, more grounded, more present. It's a slow transformation that mirrors the character arc, and once I clocked it, I felt dumb for ever doubting her.
Her character differentiation is solid too. Hatch gets a lower, steadier register. The various Old City power players each carry their own energy. Nothing as theatrical as what Steven Pacey would do — Steven Pacey walked so other narrators could run, always and forever — but it's effective and clean for a single-narrator production. Sterlin’s performance makes me want to hear her handle completely different material; Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever is a historical romance that might showcase her range in an entirely different light.
Content Warning: Henry Does Not Flinch
I need to flag this hard. This book has graphic violence, sexual violence, trafficking, and abuse. Henry uses these elements deliberately — the Old City is a nightmare because the people running it are nightmares — but if you're looking for a whimsical retelling, this ain't it. This is closer to grimdark than fairy tale. I was prepping NPC backstories for my next campaign session while listening and had to stop because the book's content was making all my NPCs way too dark. (Dr. Patel would be thrilled to know I was at least adjacent to productive work at 2 AM. Adjacently.)
Who's Rolling Initiative on This
If you like dark retellings, urban fantasy with actual menace, or grimdark with a fairy-tale skeleton — yes, absolutely grab this. If you've read Naomi Novik's work or Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy, Alice lives in a nastier neighborhood but shares that "fairy tales were always dark" DNA. Progression fantasy fans might appreciate Alice's arc even without stat blocks (tragic, I know).
Skip it if graphic content is a dealbreaker. Seriously. This isn't a "mild content warning" situation. Also skip if you need a fleshed-out magic system — the magic here is atmospheric, not systematic, and we never get clear rules for how anything works. That bugged me a little, I won't lie.
Worth a Spell Slot, Not Your Highest One
Good book. Not great, but good. The world-building carries it hard, Alice's arc is genuinely rewarding, and Sterlin's performance grows on you in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental. At 8 and a half hours it's a clean one-or-two-session listen — not everything needs to be a 40-hour commitment. I read this instead of writing my thesis, and I'd do it again, but I wouldn't burn a full-price credit when there's a Stormlight reread calling my name. Wait for a sale or grab it through your library app. You'll be glad you did, just... maybe don't listen at 1 AM alone.
