The theme [of "Through the Broken Mirror with Alice"] is Man Against Man; nature has … been eliminated and, as far as one can see, all good men, including fathers and grandfathers, have been killed off. The scene is Harlem; the heroine is Alice who has been kicked out of her 12th foster home with only an imaginary bee to keep her company and a copy of [Lewis Carroll's] "Through the Looking Glass." Bee and book are both important: the bee to buzz inside Alice's head whenever life becomes too much, the book to convert the unhappy world of Harlem into the chessboard world of Lewis Carroll.

Alice, of course, becomes a pawn; the local librarian is the White Queen, the school history teacher is the Black Queen ("All the black ways around here belong to me," the Black Queen says. "And all the white ways belong to me...