Review of "Allie’s Adventure on the Wonder" by Erika Lynn Adams

​Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)

Have you ever felt like you were misunderstood? Like everything you did was torn down and criticized at no fault of your own? It's like the whole world was against you. And nothing you did was ever good enough. Like nothing you did was ever right or accepted, no matter how hard you tried.

Have you ever been made to feel broken, incapable, or incompetent by people who seem broken, incapable, and incompetent themselves?

Well, Allie's Adventure on the Wonder perfectly captures these feelings.
The feelings of an underdog. The struggles of a black sheep.

We feel like we're repeating a bit of what we said in our review of Liliana’s Match: Finding Bella by Victoria Smith, a book about a girl with ADHD & anxiety. However, though the two books are similar in their themes, they're different enough to still be great in their own right.

We greatly appreciated this Allie's Adventure on the Wonder for the story it told, the characters it gave us, and the themes it tactfully explored. It spoke to us. It resonated with us.

Perhaps its greatest strength is that it gave us several outstanding characters including one of the best protagonists (in Allie) and one of the best villains of the year (in Mrs. Heartred). It also gave us a nominee for Best Supporting Character (in Charlie).

If you want to score highly in an Outstanding Creator Awards contest in either Fiction or Children's Books, just give us GREAT CHARACTERS. Make them relatable. Make them people we can root for (or against). This shouldn't be a secret. However, people apparently haven't caught on. Great characters can save an average or generic plot (which this book somewhat veers into). They can make up for average writing.

The trope of escaping (either mentally or physically) into a fantasy realm is nothing new or fresh. Plots are CONSTANTLY alluding to (or outright using) Neverland (from Peter Pan) or Wonderland (from Alice in Wonderland) to tell some intertextual or metatextual tale about reality and fiction mirroring each other. It has kinda been done to death.

But what elevates this book from the brink of cliche and redundancy is how relatable a character Allie is and what a demonic, devilish b&$t Mrs. Heartred is.

Mrs. Heartred represents every persecutory, emotionally & psychologically abusive, and dismissive teacher you ever had. But she's not comically evil. She's not pure evil. She's the scariest kind of evil: REALISTIC evil. She is the kind of person we could imagine sneaking into schools with a BS online degree to teach our kids how to BS their education, all while traumatizing and discouraging the kids who are trying and actually want to do well.

Teachers like this exist! And it stinks!

Mrs. Heartred encourages mediocrity while crushing innovation, creativity, and outside-the-box thinking.

It's like she has to crush, criticize, and/or shut down every single new idea, every single new project, and every single question or insightful thought that Allie has.

It's maddening!

It really creates this powerful tension that we, the reader/audience, can't help but be compelled by and engaged with.

We want Allie to succeed--to show Mrs. Heartred up--for no other reason than we hate Mrs. Heartred ("Mrs. Hatred") so much.

Adding to the tension, we see how Mrs. Heartred treats other students differently and favorably, all while dismissing and belittling Allie and her condition as "your so-called Auditory Processing Disorder."

But, as we alluded to before, Mrs. Heartred still comes around as a realistic rather than comical or over-the-top villain. She actually has a backstory, displacing her own harsh thoughts and opinions about her disabled child on Allie. She also finds the poisoning of a certain student's food shocking, lower than she would even go.

Oh, and by the way, Mrs. Heartred isn't the only villain. The Decker Sisters are quite formidable.

Allie is a likable and relatable character who happens to suffer from Auditory Processing Disorder (APD). Rather than making her seem weird, crazy, or unusual, this book makes her (and others like her) seem like someone we could actually BE or befriend. Allie loves things that many of us loved growing up: Harry Potter, Dragon Lance, and Dragon Ball Z. She's also insightful, innovative, and creative.

She's clearly the best creator in her class, which would be recognized if Mrs. Heartred weren't her teacher.

One last character we have to talk about is Charlie.

Charlie is a character who ultimately tugged on our hearts and broke it. His connection and chemistry with Allie is unmistakable. It's powerful! It's one of the best chemistries we've seen two characters have this year. Both are characters who are a bit unusual, misunderstood, and looked down upon by others, but they find peace, comfort, and care in each other.

Their pseudo-romantic bond is beautiful.

There's also quite a bit of humor in here. One of our favorite scenes involved Allie's father, a tick, and some Raid. That was genuinely hilarious.

Anyway, this is a book that does a great job at presenting APD tactfully and in an understandable way, all while giving us great characters who are sure to make you feel a certain way.

Check it out on Amazon!