Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Isabelle Simler @isabellesimler
published by @edcourtesetlongues in 2025
The reversible cover is an invitation to vertigo, a deck of cards that opens into the rabbit hole and, on the other side of the earth, Alice appears among people walking upside down. Perhaps Isabelle herself walks that way, to see the world from another angle.
The feeling of falling is emphasized by the sequence of gloves, Alice’s and the Rabbit’s, waving as the girl holds the flamingo and drinks a cup of mushroom tea. On the back cover, the card-hole turns into the Rabbit’s house, and we begin to glimpse what this Isabelle, acrobat of perspectives, can do with framings and angles that make us doubt whether our heads are still in place.
The endpapers, with subtle silhouettes of Alice and the Rabbit, speak of journey, growth, and transformation, of losing and finding oneself in the forest. We are crossed by the Rabbit’s movement, who has already escaped the page, running across the grass near the bored girl. From emptiness to a garden full of insects meticulously drawn, we follow Isabelle the entomologist, who loves colors, petals, and tiny wings, and invites us to search for enigmas hidden in the grass and margins of the page.
Queen of metamorphoses, she turns the rabbit hole into a plant, a strand of hair, a spiral, a passage inward. The Rabbit plays across the spread, unfolding into metonymies and metaphors of deep descent. We see in fragments and are invited to expand the imaginal field, to complete the motion, the landscape becoming body.
The hole opens across a double page in unexpected curves. Where is the Rabbit? Where is Alice? Have we already become rabbits and Alices falling into our own impossible thoughts? Small clues invite us to keep traveling, falling, falling, falling. Between wide landscapes and minute details, the upside-down girl leads us inside the burrow as coauthors of this world revealed through visual ellipses and hints.
Doors within doors, and I wonder if I am dreaming, or if I am part of someone else’s dream. I am swept away by suggestions and vertigo. Isabelle pulls me into the book, showing the scene from Alice’s point of view. I become Alice, looking at my own hands.
The girl who walks upside down knows how to play with the limits of the page, its edges and folds, what appears and what hides. She invites the reader’s gaze to cross over. Zas. I feel the transparencies in her subtle lines. I run with the strokes, across the borders, through fur and foliage. It is the art of losing oneself and daydreaming in the fullness of incompleteness.
At times I am Alice, at others I fly out of the book. A girl swinging among cocoons, who already mastered the riddle of the Caterpillar. A mushroom-becoming girl who not only walks upside down but also turns into cocoon, butterfly, mushroom, pure becoming and transformation.
No portmanteau word could contain her infinite becoming. The upside-down girl invites us to play at losing and finding ourselves among colors, lines, desires, and tuned deliriums. It makes you want to slide along the Cheshire Cat’s whiskers, and we feel grateful to have heard this story so many times, just to see a new girl turn it all upside down again.
She surprises us with cups, creatures with beaks, feet, and wings, hybrid animals that recall Carroll’s insects playing at being and not being. In this surreal dream I rediscover my curiosity. It is beautiful how she recreates time, since the Hatter confides that if we become his friends, he will make the clock do whatever we wish. The art of losing and finding oneself in the forest demands pacts with time.
The slit in the tree leads me to a place I’ve visited a thousand times, yet peek at for the first. The Queen turns into a paper doll with paper clothes, and we enter the territory of play and childhood. We keep growing and shrinking among details and open scenes that seem to choreograph our breathing.
This book is a dance, a silent symphony, a banquet of edible flowers, a teacup brewed from a special species of mushroom not yet catalogued by science.
We dive to the ocean floor and return to the surface of the playing cards, to the absurdities of Alice’s trial, as if after so much reverie there could still be room for law.
The upside-down girl turns me once more into Alice, suspended between dream and reality, where everything spins in spirals, where I no longer even doubt who I am and no doubt makes sense.
I return to the garden.
I return to the margin.
I return to the dream-girl, the one of always and never.
And can I still doubt why I love this book so much?
Thanks to @Seperluxus, and if you’d like to see more images from the book, you can visit her Instagram.
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