The Effect of Living Backwards

Heidi Julavits' second novel veers from the authentic to the virtual, treading the fine line between the two and maintaining its balance. It draws on Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and is a bit of a wild ride. As the Queen in Alice Through The Looking Glass says,"the effect of living backwards...always makes one a little giddy at first." It explores the complicated relationship between Alice and Edith, the sister who Alice alternately adores and despises, from Alice's point of view. Edith says,"It's the cutthroats who survive, Alice, not the most virtuous." Alice is a "good girl" who longs to be a survivor; Edith, the wild thing, allies herself with the enemy.
This is a post-9/11 (referred to as "The Big Terrible") novel framed around a hijacking, authentic or virtual is hard to determine. Moral dilemmas are presented with ironic humour. Julavits makes the tedium of living for weeks with a group of strangers in a hijacked airplane palpable. Alice has an odd but sweet romance with the hostage negotiator who knows more than he should about her background; I liked the passages about the relationship between Alice and Pitcairn best. And it has an epilogue (I love epilogues in books or movies) that is almost sentimental and optimistic. Good read.