Down the Rabbit Hole

Author: Peter Abrahams
Recommended Age: 10 and up
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-0737701-6
ISBN-10: 0-06-073701-08 
Year Published: 2005
No. Pages: 375
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Main Character Gender: Female
Read & Reviewed by: Jon





Ingrid Levin-Hill is a thirteen-year old girl who is in the wrong place at the wrong time or at least her shoes are. Getting them back means solving a murder mystery. Ingrid is a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and keeps his book next to her bed. So it's not surprising that she wants to solve the death of Katherine Kovac, known around town as Cracked-Up Katie whom she met minutes before her death. Ingrid has left her Puma cleats at Katherine's house. She goes "down the rabbit hole" much like the role she is playing in the local theater group's rendition of Alice in Wonderland. Will Ingrid solve the murder before the murderer gets to her?

Ingrid is an intelligent main character. She has a good eye for spotting clues and Abrahams brought, me, the reader along for the ride. Ingrid is stubborn and resolved in solving the case by herself because she doesn't want to implicate herself and doesn't know whom to trust. Subsequently, she is very tight lipped and won't spill any information. Ingrid is hard to trick. She is a quick thinker and plans ahead. I really liked her as a character and I wished that she was my friend. I missed her when I moved on to other books.

There are a lot of allusions in this novel to Alice in Wonderland, Dial M for Murder, Hounds of the Baskervilles and others. It is great fun if you know these pieces of literature to see how Abrahams wove them into the novel. For example, Ingrid breaks into Katie's house and literally falls down a hole in a window and just like Alice, things get turned around in the new world of hers.

Written in first person point of view, using Ingrid's voice Abrahams has wonderful writing techniques. For example, he adds all of Ingrid's text messages throughout the story. He also creates suspense by ending each chapter with a cliffhanger or foreshadowing what will happen next. The suspense sucked me in from the start and kept me reading to the end.

I have never read a book like this one and this reading experience affected me profoundly. Now I consume books whereas before I read them because I had to. Down the Rabbit Hole showed me the potential of books. I rated this book a nine out of ten and recommend it to anyone with a love of mystery.