It's just a delicious, borderline hallucinatory, confection of a book. Invention and imagination tumble over each other in the excitement, and there is something in there to delight every reader. There are countless plays on words (the mouse giving a very dry lecture on William the Conqueror to restore those who have been soaked by Alice's gigantic tears is the one that, for some reason, pleased me most), verbal pyrotechnics and semantic shenanigans to please the "ordinary" reader. And although they entirely passed me by at the time, I know now from various more scientifically-minded friends that their childish interests snagged on the mathematician author's various numerical and logic puzzles.