Dear Reader,
I began writing BERNARD PEPPERLIN to find an answer to a one-hundred-and-fifty-four-year-old question—What happened to the Dormouse in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
The last we see of the sleepy Dormouse, he is being poked, prodded, insulted and then stuffed into a teapot. And that’s that! But anyone who’s read Lewis Caroll knows that nothing is that simple; and that commonplace doors or fans or bottles or cakes can be portals into stranger worlds.
So where did the dormouse go? And what world could be stranger than wonderland?
This a mystery I might have left unexamined if it weren’t for the mice in my life. Maybe you have mice in your life too. Mine are two brainy, dark-haired children, who know what it’s like to grow up different in a rainy rural place where every day seems the same and you have to make your own fun; not unlike the place Alice stumbles across during the Mad Tea Party—where time has stopped, and entertainment revolves around making up funny songs, or riddles with no answer, or arguing about who put butter on your watch gears.
For the dormouse, shoved into a teapot in 1865 near the March Hare’s Cottage, time starts again with a bang—or rather the sound of boat’s horn, the rattle of subway cars, and the bustling noise of a Chinatown street market. He emerges in brackish river water, in the one place that just might be stranger than wonderland—Lower Manhattan in 2019. No more poking, no more insults, no more nodding off or time standing still; here beneath the glittering lights of the city the dormouse finds fantastic creatures—among them street-wise bodega cats, lock picking lizards, revolutionary rats, tap dancing cockroaches, opera-loving frogs, coffee addicted squirrels and a beautiful Chelsea queen.
I wrote Bernard Pepperlin for my mouse family--who knows what it’s like to be different, picked on, bored, grief-shocked, dream-driven, resilient and fabulous. I wrote it for refugees and misfit kids of every age who know how you can struggle and be mistreated in one world—but come to shine in another. I wrote it so everyone might know that art and friendship can get you through.
I hope Bernard Pepperlin finds a home in your heart,
Cara Hoffman