Read Through the Looking-Glass in Englishwith every sentence explained

Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll was first published in 1871. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 29,100 words.

Step through the mirror, where everything runs backwards.

One snowy November afternoon, Alice is playing with her kitten by the fire and wondering what the world inside the looking-glass is like. Then the glass melts away like mist, and she climbs straight through into a house where the books are printed backwards and the chess pieces walk and talk.

Outside, the countryside is laid out like a giant chessboard, and Alice joins the game as a pawn. If she can cross every square to the far side, she will become a queen. Along the way she meets the bossy Red Queen, the quarrelling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the proud egg Humpty Dumpty and a kindly but hopeless White Knight.

Lewis Carroll's 1871 sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is full of wordplay, logic puzzles and famous nonsense poems, including "Jabberwocky".

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.