Book Title:  Alice, I think
Author: Susan Juby
Publishing Company:  Harper Perennial
Year:  2007 (paperback) (originally published in 2000)
# of Pages: 239
ISBN-13:  978-0-00-200889-1
ISBN-10:  0-00-200889-0
$16.95

3 Stars

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner

Harper Perennial has re-issued Alice, I think, the first in Susan Juby's three-book series about a self-absorbed teen that appeared on the scene in 2000 and became the subject of a Canadian television series.  The new edition includes 17 pages of new features:  Author Biography; An Interview with Susan Juby; "Alice, Immature Adult:  A Page from Alice's Diary at Age Twenty-five"; Recommended Reading (a list of children's books that Juby thinks adults would enjoy); and "Web Detective," featuring links to subjects that would be of interest to Alice and her readers, such as the Town of Smithers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Lord of the Rings.

Alice MacLeod tells her story through her diary, a story of an imaginative, playful girl who went to her first day of school dressed as a hobbit and became a target of bullying.  The result was years of home-schooling by her two flower children parents, leading to teen-aged years spent at a community center for troubled teens where a counselor suggests she might go back to conventional school.

The book caught on enough to lead to two sequels, Miss Smithers, and Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last.  It also became a television series, Alice, I think, starring Carly McKillip.

I'm afraid I have to confess I just don't get it.  Although the book is billed as "hilarious," I found it pitiful, not funny.  Alice experiences rather violent bullying (but so enjoys the bruises on her face that she uses her mother's make-up to keep the look when they start to fade), seeing her mother fighting hand-to-hand with a bully in a grocery store parking lot, encountering a stylist who gives her a haircut from hell, doing her clothing shopping in a thrift store, and dealing with a cousin caught up in a world of drugs, sex and rebellion.  These are hardly humorous topics.

Alice seems to have very little emotion, her story told in a snarky, adult voice that demonstrates this book is far more for adults looking back on terrible teen-aged years than for young adults living through them.  Although the story (without chapters) is broken up with occasional dates to give it the appearance of a diary, it doesn't read like a diary at all, but rather from a far away, looking-back-on-it-all perspective.  Since little of Alice's emotion is conveyed, I found it hard to glean a real sense of her character.  Similarly, the other characters, such as family members, the school bullies, and Alice's guidance counselor, were not engaging.

On a recent two-hour wait in a doctor's office, I was pleased to have Alice, I think with me as an alternative to the dog-eared, germ-ridden stack of out-dated magazines available for diversion.  But I am hard-pressed to think of another situation where I would recommend this book when there are so many better books available.  Still, who am I to argue with success?  Obviously, Juby's stories have struck a chord with someone-apparently, a great many someones.  That should give hope to all authors.