Before taking the SAT, students should read After Alice.
If the classic Merriam-Webster dictionary or SAT preparation book is too dry for you, pick up this Gregory Maguire’s novel to find the words calumny, corporeally, vatic, aspidistra, diatribe, polliwogged, promontory, ontological, benighted or bewigged used in context.
After Alice, a 2015 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland, features a children’s topic, youthful perspective, and old-world academic language. When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole the first time, she unearthed the world of Wonderland teeming with the same adult foibles and obvious obliviousness she had left behind in the world above.
In this re-telling, made almost incomprehensible at points with “existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable” vocabulary, Alice’s friend Ada inadvertently follows her to Wonderland. The writing style becomes curiouser and curiouser as Maguire adds oddly-extended conjugations like embarkation or capacious. This advanced academic vocabulary does fit the setting of Victorian Oxford, where Ada and Alice’s relatives react to their disappearance. However formal the foggy, third-person omniscient writing style is, the story still weaves talking walruses and walking oysters into a colorful plotline, creating a world pleasantly unlike our own.