Overview
Alice Liddell is the girl who notices everything: the geometry of lies at dinner parties, the pattern architecture of adult conversation, the precise 0.3-millimeter dilation of pupils when someone misrepresents the origin of asparagus. She catalogs the world with the clinical precision of a scientist and the detachment of a girl who learned very early that reporting what she sees makes people look at her the way they look at spiders.
At Thornwood Academy, they call what she does Pattern Magic -- or more formally, Unraveling. She is Rooted into Ironwood, where logic is currency and efficiency is king.
Gift
Alice's Gift allows her to see the logical rules underlying reality and, with training, to break or rewrite them. Mastery requires holding contradictions simultaneously -- accepting that two incompatible things can both be true.
The risk: losing the distinction between real and unreal.
At Thornwood
Alice connects with Mabel, who catalogs beetles with religious devotion. With Chess -- the Cheshire boy -- who phases in and out of solidity. With Gilbert Blythe, about whom Alice is developing inconvenient spatial-proximity feelings. And with the Hatter, who teaches Unraveling and whose warnings suggest Alice's Gift for seeing patterns may have arrived just in time for everything to fall apart.
Notable
- Rooted into Ironwood Grove
- Companion: Chess, a glass spider whose webs are mathematical proofs
- Lobbies relentlessly for her preferred terminology. Nobody cooperates.
- First student to realize the Hollows are communicating with each other