Jeff Noon is a clever young Englishman whose best-selling first novel, Vurt, netted him the Arthur C. Clarke award for British science fiction. In Automated Alice, Noon tries his hand at updating Lewis Carroll's classic Alice tales for children. Now, instead of disappearing down the rabbit hole or through the mirror, Alice is trapped in the Manchester of 1998, where she must find a dozen missing jigsaw pieces and eat the Radishes of Time to return to her proper place in 1860. Noon is obviously a fan of both the original Alice books and witty British phrasings, and his book is full of clever puns, riddles and post-modern references, as well as authorial intrusions and treacly preciousness. That's the book's big flaw: The original Alice books were precious, treacly things intended for eight-year-old girls, but they were also full of the mind-stretching puzzles in logic and mathematics which lent the books some of their eventual immortality. Noon's book is more of a long inside joke for Alice fans. If that's not enough to recommend it to you—and if on top of that you're the type who'd pay to see Winnie the Pooh go hunny-mad and grind his teeth on Alice's pinafore-coated, still-complaining ass—this book's forced precocity might be enough to make you toss up your teabiscuits.