Howard Anita Libros

This book contrasts the portrayal of kings and kingship in the drama of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81), concentrating on the ways in which both dramatists use the individual complexities of their kingly characters to address the intellectual and moral dilemmas of the ideological backgrounds that helped to create them. Against the background of seventeenth-century Europe, when religious and political reformation was leading to reconstructions of concepts of authority and personal and national identity, these two dramatists of early modern England and Spain use the increasingly theatrical facades of absolutist power to explore the internal drama of individual psychology and the kinship of flawed humanity.

Alyssa Gardner, directly descended from Alice Liddell, the real life inspiration for Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, hears the whispers of bugs and flowers, precisely the problem that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. When her mother becomes worse and the whispers grow too strong to bear, Alyssa realises she must find the origins of the family curse, a search that leads her through a cracked mirror into the real Wonderland, a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There she must decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland who may have dark motives all of his own