Review: `There must be something more'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 27, 2013
Nancy Christie's essays and fiction can be found on the pages of magazines as diverse in nature as any writer today is published.  These and her books explore ways to make the most out of life's challenges. As a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, she writes articles for print and online publications as well as serving as a copywriter for corporations and marketing/advertising firms. Her skill in writing short stories is a strong one and quite unlike any others writing today.Christie's take on the infamous ALICE IN WONDERLAND is as charming as the matrix on which it is based. Alice in this brief story is on indeterminate age, lives upstairs in a room filled with books which she devours (literally) as her only escape from the drudgery of caring for her cranky, ill, bedridden mother. `The schedule was set in stone, like hieroglyphics incised on the walls of an ancient tomb. Breakfast at eight, then pills, then empty the catheter bag hanging on the side of the bed of its smelly yellow liquid. Bathe the bits and pieces of a body that, each day, seemed less human and more like a shrunken mass of skin and muscle tissue barely attached to bone.'Between tending to her demanding mother's needs Alice creates a world of magnificence, tended by servants, wearing bejeweled robes and dwelling in Cairo, Alexandria, Mozambique, Tangiers, Jerusalem, North Africa in her mind as she tears bits and pieces of the books describing these places and eats them. Or as Christie so sensitively describes this habit, `But when she opened her books, the world shifted and changed. It was a different reality, a glittering wonderland of power. And she was a different Alice----no longer the one being commanded, but the one commanding. Men bowed before her, bearing gifts of gold and jewels and silks. Servants waited for her commands, their one goal in life to please her. She had only to lift her hand and the world was at her feet.'There is as much beauty of language and magic of transformation as that of the Alice who went down the rabbit hole as this Alice who merely goes down the stairs. It is a delight from page one to the end. Grady Harp, November 13