Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31gV3KeEqqL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Bibliographic Information:

Go Ask Alice By Anonymous

(Beatrice Sparks)

ISBN: 0-671-66458-1

1971  Simon&Schuster, New York, NY

Plot Summary:

Go Ask Alice is packaged as the diary of a young girl in the late 1960s, early 1970s teen culture. The book begins with Alice promising to confide in her diary everything in her life. Alice begins to work on losing weight, to make herself more attractive for the boy she likes. She seriously limits her food intake until she has lost almost all the weight she thinks she needs to lose to be loveable.

Later, Alice’s father finds out that he’s gotten a great job at a University and they are going to have to move. Alice vows to be thin and perfect when she arrives at her new school. Things do not turn out as perfect as she thought they would and Alice turns to food for comfort and gains weight. Alice’s parents promise that she can spend her summer with her grandparents, in her old home town, so she again tries to lose weight.

While Alice is staying with her grandparents, she is slipped LSD at a party and the world of drugs opens up to her. Alice goes back and forth over wanting drugs and wanting to quit drugs. She begins having sex, but only when she’s high.

After returning back to the college town where her parents live, Alice stumbles into the drug culture there. She begins pushing drugs and sleeping with her dealer. Their relationship goes sour and she chooses to run away with another girl.

Alice has periods of sobriety and relapse and suffers social consequences of getting clean before she is finally sent away to rehab. In the end, Alice promises her diary that she will stay clean.

Critical Evaluation:

This story is written as if it is the diary of an addicted young girl. Right near the beginning, there is foreshadowing of her problems when she attaches acceptance to being thin and starves herself to achieve control. When control is taken from her and she is drugged, she sees it as her choice to continue taking drugs or not. Alice believes that she chooses to get high because it feels good.

The dark portions of the diary, when Alice is homeless and dirty, are less coherent and the writing style breaks down, presumably to express the problems with a drug addled mind. The reader can tell when Alice’s thoughts are clearer because the writing is more precise. This shows when Alice goes to rehab and then chooses to start a new diary.

Another incident of foreshadowing is when Alice gets a babysitting job and the previous babysitter shows up, high and demanding. Later on, Alice’s sober world falls apart at that babysitting job. It is no surprise that the young woman who lost the babysitting job to Alice testifies against her.

The imagery in the book of the euphoria and pain involved in drug addiction is graphic. This is serious stuff, written for older teens.

Reader’s Annotation:

A young girl chronicles her decent into sever drug addiction and tries to claw her way back out.

Author Information:

Beatrice Sparks was an American therapist and Mormon youth counselor who was known for producing books purporting to be the 'real diaries' of troubled teenagers. The books deal with topical issues such as drug abuse, Satanism, teenage pregnancy or AIDS, and are presented as cautionary tales. Although Sparks always presented herself as merely the discoverer and editor of the diaries, records at the U.S. Copyright Office show that in fact she was listed as the sole author for all but two of them.

Sparks began working with teenagers in 1955, after attending the University of California at Los Angeles and Brigham Young University. She has worked as a music therapist at Utah State Mental Hospital and taught continuing education courses at BYU.

Critics have called the precise extent of Sparks' qualifications and experience into question. The editorial credit on some of the diaries published by Sparks identifies her as "Dr Beatrice Sparks, PhD". However, when journalist Aileen Pace Nilsen interviewed Sparks for School Library Journal in 1979, she was unable to find any confirmation of where or when Sparks earned her doctorate. Nilsen also wrote that Sparks was "vague about specifics" when asked about her counseling qualifications and professional experience.

Sparks said that her experience working with troubled adolescents made her want to produce cautionary tales that would keep other teens from falling into the same traps. Her first work, Go Ask Alice, was published under the byline 'Anonymous' in 1971.

Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/69007.Beatrice_Sparks on 7/26/2015

Genre(s):

Realistic Fiction

Curriculum Ties:

Drug Abuse

Booktalk Ideas:

This is a great opening for booktalks on diaries, drug use, runaways, and addiction.

Reading level: grade 7+

Interest age: 13+

Challenge Issues:

Drug use and sexuality are prominent in this book.

Challenge Defense File

Why I chose this book:

I chose this book because it is a historically best-selling book that examines teenage relationships with drugs, sex, family, and friends. This perspective is alarming and grabs the reader’s attention.