A small misstep and a life can change; a journey south and history can change just as easily. Wonderland,Tracy Farr’s 2024 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize winning novel is a parallel reality of the Miramar Peninsula in 1912, one in which world-famous scientist Marie Curie retreats from sickness and scandal to the solace of a family cottage at the bottom of the world. Doctor Matti Loverock and her showman husband Charlie – along with their seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna – welcome this mysterious woman into their home with care and quiet curiosity. All the while the nearly-defunct amusement park Wonderland hovers close by, a beacon of nostalgia, of hopefulness and of the danger that comes with holding too tightly to the past. 

Tracy Farr writes a cast of brilliant women into the heart of this story. From Madame Professor Lady Marie Curie and the calming presence of mother-doctor-wife Matti Loverock to the menagerie of local women Mrs Reedy, Jane Deere the Cameleer and Doctor Agnes Bennett–it is these women who bring life to the Miramar cottage. They birth babies and discover radium, drive trucks and fly hot-air balloons, stare down debt collections and brew kawakawa tea. Yet it is the inquisitive and whimsical triplets who command from the start: ‘Here is a story. We can tell it to you. We saw it with our own six eyes.’

Farr’s writing is lyrical and rhythmic, both as it appears on the page and in its pacing. The bustling collective voice of Ada, Oona and Hanna reads whimsically throughout. Though they mature and become more distinct, their voices remain lovingly intertwined. Meanwhile, the voice of Madame Curie in her early chapters is pain on paper:

Footsteps fleeting pass my door, not the
mother-doctor-wife, but her daughters three
girls, one voice.
Is it day? It cannot be day.
Is it night? Star light, star bright.

This pain, in its fragments and blank moments, heals into something more reminiscent of poetry, and from poetry to strong prose: the typeset text is a reflection of recovery as the story progresses.

A sing-song quality remains consistent throughout the story, particularly the jingling question of ‘When will we go to Wonderland?’. The triplets hold the amusement park and its power dear, believing ‘Wonderland cures all ills’. But their father Carnival Charlie struggles to maintain this wonderland – as both a dream and financial reality. It is this refusal to let go of the past that pushes the story to an edge. 

At the long-awaited Winter Gala, the triplets bring Madame Curie to their favourite Wonderland hideaway, the Fantastical Fernery (A Glimpse of Paradise! Lit by Electricity!), only to be met with ‘the skeletons of ferns’. A crack in their innocence emerges, and through the cascading events that follow the haven of the Miramar cottage is flipped over, roles reverse, and the reality that all things change becomes undeniable. 

Wonderland is a novel that honours the resilience of women, the intricacies of sisterhood and the bittersweet beauty of change. Farr deftly explores innocence and loss, and in giving us a story that asks ‘what-if’, shows the power of imagination to reframe the past and reminds us to return humanity to those who have become characters of history.

Reviewed by Lauren Donald