Go Ask Alice

Rating:
Summary: Go ask Alice
Review: This has to be one of my favorite books of all time. its about a girl, 15 or 16 years old who is caught between doing the right thing and trying to fit in. it is written in diary form which i think makes it all the more interesting and if you are like me and you like that sort of thing than you'll love this book. her life is basically boring and flat out ordinary until she is invited to a party by one of the "popular" girls in school. This is where her life begins. At the party they play a game called "button button who's got the button" and it turns out that her drink was spiked with LSD. she describes how she feels and what her subconcious was telling her. she says that she knew it was wrong but it felt so good that she didn't feel guilt at all. after that incident her life becomes much different and over time as you read you see and feel her changing. This book is full of sex and drugs so anyone with an interest in those things should read it.

Rating:
Summary: Go Ask Alice
Review: Imagine being a teenager, forced to try new things, and exploring the world of drugs by peer pressure. This is the life of a young girl as told through her diary. Go Ask Alice is a great book that represents the hardships of a 15-year-old drug addict. The author begins the diary by being insecure and pressured by her parents. She becomes anorexic at first, trying to lose weight by not eating , and then discovers LSD while at a friend's party. Her friend Jill had put LSD in 10 of the 14 bottles of coke, and the writer drank one with LSD in it. Ever since then, she becomes fascinated by the effect of the drug, which leads to her exploration of other drugs, and soon she becomes addicted. Soon enough, she is selling drugs and is experiencing some very rough times with her boyfriend, and her family.
From my viewpoint, I feel that this was a very intriguing novel and is one that all young teens should read. Many adolescents today are experiencing similar problems and are suffering through difficult times. It is so important that kids my age understand the value of life, and that we don't throw it away. By being captivated by drugs, this can put your life in great danger. So, learn from this teen by reading Go Ask Alice, a suspenseful story that may change your life.

Rating:
Summary: Opened my eyes to a whole new world
Review: Title: Go Ask Alice

Author: Anonymous

Pages: 158Date Started- 02 /15/04

Category: Drama Date Completed- 03/06/04

Annotation: "Go Ask Alive" is about a Fourteen year old girl who is caught between two separate lives. This is a diary of a young girl's experiences facing the world with drugs. Her whole life is turned upside down, as she experiences many places of danger. Mistakes are made, and lessons are learned. Alice is an ordinary teenager who make's her way down a long road somewhat slowly, but yet accomplished.

Author Bio: The " Alice" of the book's title refers to the druggie girl of that name in 1967 Jefferson Airplane hit White Rabbit, a song that expounds upon a drug theme it's lyricist found in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Beatrice Sparks is the editor of this story rather than the Author. Beatrice has written several other stories about lives ruined by many bad choices. She is a well known author always allowing her readers to face reality. Both teenagers and adults can relate to these life issues that we may have faced or will face someday.

Evaluation: I found this story to be a wonderful eye opener for all teenagers living on this planet. "Go Ask Alice" is a diary of a young fourteen year old girl struggling to fit in with the crowd. Unfortunately the wrong crowd grabs a hold of her and drags her into the reality of drugs. When Alice began to write in her diary, you could immediately point out the fact that this was a teenager writing all of her thoughts and emotions into one piece. The only difference was her world consisted of drugs, and only drugs. It all began when Alice's father got a new job that would force the family to move. Which meant Alice would have to find by drugs, and soon this was the only factor that was important to her. Alice faces an extreme obstacle, and anyone who experienced what she had, or hasn't will be greatly affected by this moving story.
As soon as I picked this story up, I couldn't put it down. I've always been told throughout my life what drugs can possibly do to you. I was never satisfied with the thoughts, or reality of what harm can be done to ones life. In my mind I could see Alice, and I saw this amazing young girl who was completely lost. Alice was pressured, and her peers persuaded her to fall into they're world full herself, and new friends all over again. It didn't take long until Alice did find people that seemed interested in her. They took her into a different world, a world that was full of extraordinary different places that she had never been to before. This was the life of a drug addict, and that's just what Alice became in a very short period of time. Her life had been taken over by drugs. The most amazing feeling was brought about Alice, and she liked that it was so different, and much more unique than anything she had ever felt before. In any teenager's life, one feels loved and wanted by this substance. That's why so many turn they're lives over to it. I understand, and strive to find out even more answers to why drugs have to be such a great

Rating:
Summary: A Very Realistic Diary About a Girl Using Drugs
Review: This is a book about a troubled girl in high school named Alice. In the book she starts out having trouble with her social life, and is very greatful for the few friends she has. One summer when she meets up with an old friend, she gets invited to a party. When she comes the the party they are using drugs, putting STDs in their sodas. Soon, Alice gets addicted to drugs and this totally damaged everything who she is.

When Alice goes back home from her grandma's house, she gets involved at a bad crowd at her school who also use drugs. Soon she finds herself running away from home to San Fransisco with a friend where she ends up selling drugs to kids of all age - even some eleven and twelve year olds. She falls in love with a drug dealer and ends up getting cheated on and leaving her with a broken heart, which makes the situation even worse.

In this diary written by a real girl it is the most realistic thing I've ever read. A must-read book that is dark and sad.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful PSA
Review: I first read this book nine years ago when I was 13. At the time I believed it was a real diary. I couldn't believe what I was reading - intelligent, popular teenagers shamelessly enjoying drugs and describing their experiences in glorious detail?! How did this end up in my colourless, conservative public school library? I finished the book in 2 days and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I had dreams about it and tried to tell my sister and my best friend how this book would change their lives.

Forget about the part where she dies - she spends most of the book exploring alternate planes of consciousness, hitchhiking across the country in bellbottomed jeans, hiding from the cops. Boys were falling in love with her. And her parents were so fabulously, wonderfully upset!!!
The escapist fantasies it provided for me and the beautiful, lyrical yet easily-digestible prose made it my favourite book EVER.

In hindsight, it's obvious that this book isn't a factual document. In the diary it says that she threw sections of the diary into the trash as she travelled and wrote parts of it on random paper bags or napkins during the deepest throes of her addiction. When she died she was nothing more than a drug-addled, disgraced teenage casualty. So who would have the foresight/ability to go and collect all the scattered pieces of her journal?

So it's fiction. But is it merely another public service message about saying no to drugs? If that's the case then it was clearly a colossal failure because upon finishing the book I was pretty much gagging to try drugs in any form, by any means possible.

However, I think there are two kinds of teenagers, those who want to try drugs and those who don't. Those who aren't interested in drugs will read this book and walk away feeling satisfied that once again the pitiful pothead with poor judgement and a low threshold for peer pressure got what was coming to her and suffered an appropriately tragic death.

Conversely, those who _are_ interested in drugs will simply ignore the 'moral at the end of the story' and drink up the delectable tales of getting high, cause that's all they were after anyway.

In conclusion, I wouldn't reccomend buying this book for your young teen if he/she seems to have rebellious inclinations, cause there are too many positive drug episodes in the book for it to be any kind of a deterrent.

I still give the book five stars because of the impact it had on me at the age of thirteen. I still think it's beautifully (if simplistically) written. It's filled with cliches but they're classic 1960s mental health cliches and if you appreciate it as bittersweet kitsch then it's still an enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: Go ask Alice
Review: The book Go ask Alice is a wonderful teen book. This book is about a 15 year old girl name Alice who moved to a new neighborhood and went back to her old neighborhood to hang out with the wrong crowd, during the summer. When she went back to her old neighborhood, Alice was invited to a party. When Alice got there she met one of the popular girls that use to not like her. When Alice got to the party she was druged with LSD that was put into her drink. After that she was addicted to drugs. Then she started to sell drugs. Also, she went beyond the drug and started to have sex with other people. Finally, she ran away and started a new life with one of her friends, Chris. So, manily I would rate this book as 5 stars because, it's a wonderful book that a teen should read and I recommend it to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Preachy melodramatic pandering yields skepticism-film at 11.
Review: In all fairness, it would be wise of me to acknowledge that I know the public is becoming increasingly aware that _Go Ask Alice_ is not, in fact, written by the book's protagonist, but rather by one Dr. Beatrice Sparks (whose own undoing came later in the form of her 'editorial' involvement with the utterly ludicrous _Jay's Journal_). Any halfway decent book review should be about the content of the book and not the author's quasi-surreptitious lifestyle; however, the nature of _Go Ask Alice_ makes this separation nearly impossible.

The _Go Ask Alice_ story, when broken down to its core, is relatively believable: an undistinguished girl in high school falls in with the druggie crew at her school, ends up dropping out and running away, and gets trampled underfoot in the grand machine of society. If Sparks would have stuck to her guns and attempted to write this book in a voice that her protagonist might actually have used, then the book itself would have been somewhat more passable when approached from the "literary validity" standpoint. However, Dr Sparks is incapable of a) writing without being often-ridiculously preachy, and b) making matters worse by attempting to weave said preachiness into the Alice character through her reactions to incomprehensibly melodramatic situations. For example, Alice, when babysitting, consumes some candy in her babysittees' house. Miraculously, the candy is revealed to have been laced with acid by her hell-bent-on-corruption druggie pals who have nothing to do with the babysittees, and would have had to break into the house with the sole intent of lacing the specific candy (which they knew Alice would eat) with acid, then sneak back out without having left any signs of their involvement. Alice's reaction is a mixture of over-the-top goody-two-shoesism ("I'll never hang around those icky, evil people again, ever!"), completely unrealistic naivete ("But maybe they just want to show me cool things."), and awkward religious allusions ("God wouldn't want me to, or would he? Maybe God is LSD..."). (Dr Sparks, being heavily involved in the religious right, has extreme difficulty approaching religion from any moderately average mindset, as evidenced in her meisterwork, _Jay's Journal_, a book in which a boy gets into several unintentionally hilarious, preposterous situations involving "Satanism" and the "Occult" which are tipsy with the unmistakable ring of extremist Christianity.)

So what on Earth could be the saving grace of this novel, being nearly entirely devoid of literary grace or believability? The answer immediately becomes apparent when one considers the audience for which _Go Ask Alice_ was written. The Young Adult market is teeming with massive numbers of angst-ridden, pubescent adolescents, and reading a story so unbelievably melodramatic and bombastic as this--which is touted as a TRUE STORY by ANONYMOUS, no less--not only interests them, it becomes their raison d'etre. Should I seem to be patronizing, all one has to do is examine the other 300-odd reviews of this book, which include not only hundreds of teenagers saying that this book was the "greatest and most amazing" thing they've ever read, but also one girl who has made it her _life's goal_ to find out who "Alice" really is. Preposterous? Absolutely. Surprising? Not at all, if one takes the character of adolescents into account.

Because of that, Sparks has written an adolescent masterpiece, full of angst and fifteen things for young adults to brood and marvel over on every page. Whether or not _Go Ask Alice_ will head directly to the trash when said adolescents reach eighteen is a completely different matter.

Rating:
Summary: Wouldn't you?
Review: The reviews I've read almost unanimously give this book 5 stars. Generally they cite it's horrific realism about the depravity of junkies and how terribly close to home it comes as well as it's excellent writing. I've given this book 2 stars for several reasons. First I think her naivete about drugs (and many other things) is ridiculously unrealistic for a 15 year old, she seems more like an 11 or 12 year old. I know this. I'm 16 and no one I know is that naive. One would presume that the drug culture prevalent during Alice's teen years would make nearly everyone more aware than Alice supposedly is in the book. Second the character is awfully hard to pity. You want to pity her but she's too goddam stupid. She unknowingly takes the acid in the coke ("It was fun! It was glorious! But I don't think I'll ever try it again. I've heard too many frightening stories about drugs."). Then she decides to try pot. Then speed. Then torpedoes (crack and marijuana). All in one week. Allegedly she doesn't think she's in a little deep. Somehow I just don't buy into this character. Finally I object to this book because it's a new twist on an old book. Namely, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. He is one of the most gifted writers in recent times and in his book he portrays a junkie's depravity more vividly and generally far better than Go Ask Alice. One can very succinctly sum up both books with one paragraph from Burrough's Introduction. "In the words of total need: 'Wouldn't You?' Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need." So anyway, while Go Ask Alice isn't without worth I'd recommend you read Naked Lunch then Go Ask Alice because Naked Lunch is a far better book with a broader theme as it deals with addiction not just to chemicals but to other drugs in our society (i.e. power, materialism, etc.)

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Summary: Review
Review: when i first heard of this book it caught my eye and captured my attention. i quickly became engaged in the book and felt as though i was sitting their along side the characters, i did not want to put it down. being a teen, the diary being a true story opened my eyes to the world and its consequences. You can't ignore whats going on in the world, and the reality is the truth. i recommend this book to anyone willing to see the truth in a world full of pain, confusion, and abandonment

Rating:
Summary: amazing!!! the best book i've ever read!!!
Review: Go Ask Alice is a book that will suprise you and leave you wanting more. Throughout the book you will begin to connect with "Anonymous" and understand her. This book is very heartwrenching and i absolutely reccommend it. I have read the book over 10 times and it never gets old. I always seem to cry at the end. This book is especially good because it is a real diary and these things actually take place today. Go Ask Alice is the best book that i have ever read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!