A bored girl follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and falls clean out of the ordinary world — into a place where she grows and shrinks by the mouthful, a caterpillar interrogates her from a mushroom, and a cat grins itself out of existence. Carroll spun the whole thing from an afternoon's improvised nonsense on a river, then quietly made it a machine for taking logic apart: every creature Alice meets reasons flawlessly toward madness. The book that freed children's literature from its moral lesson — and taught grown-ups that a dream can be argued with.