By Lewis Carroll
Alice chases a waistcoated rabbit down a hole into Wonderland, where she shrinks and grows, sits through a mad tea party, and meets a queen who wants everyone's head off.
Alice is bored on a riverbank when a white rabbit in a waistcoat hurries past muttering that he's late, and she follows him down his hole. She lands in Wonderland, where nothing behaves the way it should. She drinks from bottles and eats cakes that shrink her to a few inches or shoot her up taller than a house. She swims through a pool made of her own tears, sits through the maddest tea party anyone ever threw, and plays croquet with live flamingos and hedgehogs. Finally she comes up against the Queen of Hearts, who wants everyone beheaded over nothing at all. There's no real plot here and no moral. It's one brilliant, absurd scene tumbling straight into the next.
This is the keepsake for an older child who's ready to be delighted instead of taught something. Sir John Tenniel's original engravings are so bound up with the book that they've become how everyone pictures Alice, the pinafore and the long hair, and a well-made hardback with those plates is the copy worth owning for good. It's the kind of book that gets handed down. The language is Victorian and rich, so it stretches a fluent reader, and the jokes and riddles pay off differently at eight, at twelve, and again at thirty. Plenty of children keep it on the shelf and dip back in for years.