Upon reading Toby Litt's "Slice," and her parent's blog "Rayandlynn's Weblog," questions immediately began to ransack my mind. First off, Lisa prefers to be known as Slice. Unquestionably a nickname usually reflects the character or nature of the person of whom it concerns. What's the correlation between the name Slice and Lisa? Slice seems to be fairly depressed and downtrodden, so does the name reflect this nature? Anyways, there is much more to the story then simply names.

Another thing that came to question was some discrepancies. The first of which involved the previous family's demise. Slice records that they are killed in Florida while taking a taxi from the airport. The account further explains that some mysterious force was possibly the culprit because the surviving taxi driver recalled, "... never seen an animal quite like it before." Then comes the conflicting account of Slice's parents. "Still thinking about those poor people dying on that plane. And we’re using their teapot!" This post really gets you asking what is really going on here.

Now we move into the darker more mysterious series of events. Slice finds out that Mary Jane was into magic. Now the plot thickens as mysterious pellets are found continually around the house. Slice believes them to be from a rat, but later watches as a rabbit appears from the wall and craps. After following the rabbit throughout the house, it eventually leads her to a hole outside, " under the ivy, just too narrow for me to get through." Now these same pellets are believed by her parents to be drugs. Wait... what? "And there were pellets of some sort on the floor. It’s possible they were marijuana, although we can’t think where she could have got it." This is the first, and only, mention of drugs throughout the story. Is this all happening in Slice's magical trip? But what about the mother who claims to have seen a rabbit come out of the wall? Is stress causing shared hallucinations? Possibly, because her mother does not see the rabbit until after she reads her daughter's blog. But is such a simple answer sufficient? Then what about Slice. Did she really find a portal to another dimension, or just to the neighbors backyard?
What do you think?