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Title: Go Ask Alice by Anonymous ISBN: 0689817851 Publisher: Simon Pulse Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.53
Rating: 5
Summary: English 9H - My Recommendation
Comment: I would definitely recommend Go Ask Alice to other people. This book is definitely one for teenagers, but because it is written through a girl's point of view, I think a girl will have a better time relating to the different situations. This book is about a girl who was addicted to drugs and eventually lost her life. It is a true story that takes place in the 1960s. This book shows the harsh reality of what a teenager must go through during their life. This story is told through a young girl's diary. Throughout the book she has struggles with herself, society and drugs. The book's ending delivers a powerful message of what can and does happen somewhere "in the real world," each and every day. The book was a frightening wake-up call to me when I read it. I couldn't believe some of the things that she had written in her diary. As you read the book you can feel how the author changes as she slips into the horrifying and lethal drug world. You can see how her use of language changes as she goes from a normal teenager to crazy and out-of-control drug addict. At certain points of the book, I was terrified. The images were described so vivid and clearly.
Before reading this book I didn't know much about drugs or the lasting effects that it had on people. Reading this book made me feel like I was right there with her, throughout her struggles. I never knew what life was like for a drug addict and what a struggle it is for them to survive.
I am a teenager and I know what it is like to be left on the outside and wanting to so desperately to fit in. Luckily I was stronger than this girl. I was able to resist drugs and peer pressure. I know a few people who did and still do drugs and I saw first hand what it did to them.
The book begins with the girl being 14 years old. She was living in a perfectly stable home. She had everything. She just didn't realize it until it was gone. Her mother, father, sister, Alex, and brother, Tim, loved her very much. Her first taste of drugs is at a party. They decide they were going to play a game called "Button, Button, Who's Got the Button?" The girl doesn't find out what the game is until it was over. The object of the game was to see who got the 10 out of 14 of the bottles of coke with LSD in them. The girl had ended up with one of the bottles and she tells her diary the way she felt while being high.
Her next diary entry talks about her wanting so bad to try pot. This is the start of the young girl's downward fall to disaster. She eventually does try pot, and many other drugs too, such as Speed and heroin. Not only does she use the drugs, but also she begins to sell them to kids her age and even younger. She does it for her boyfriend at the time, whose name was Richie.
Her mental depression adds to her usage of drugs. She is depressed because she does not respect herself. She does not care about her body while she is on drugs. She finds herself to be unattractive and not likable, so she turns to drugs to make her feel better about herself. As the drugs take over her life more and more, she begins to have sex with many men, and it doesn't really seem to bother her. It wasn't until she met the woman in the park, that she decided want she wanted to do with her life.
After being busted once, and running away from home twice, the author decides to turn her life around. She wants to become a helper to children who are thinking about trying drugs. She begins to study a lot and her grades in school begin to rise. She seemed to be on the way to a healthy recovery. The part of the book that terrified me the most was when she was sent to the hospital after giving herself self-inflicted wounds throughout her body. It is a haunting image of her bruised and battered body. I felt sick after finding out that what happened to her. It was a result of someone putting bad acid onto peanuts while she was baby-sitting an infant.
After being sent home from the insane asylum she began to do things normal teenagers do. She met new people who liked her for who she was. Unfortunately we are told in the epilogue that two weeks after she decided she wasn't going to start a new diary, that she died from an accidental overdose or a premeditated overdose. It never tells you for sure what happened.
What surprised me was that the girl's parents never gave up on her. They were always there for her when she needed them. They came and picked her up after she ran away. They supported her while she was trying to give up drugs.
I can definitely see why this book has impacted and inspired so many people for such a long time. I thought that because this was written before I was born, that I wouldn't be able to relate to or understand the issues that she was going through. To my surprise, I did understand it. It was one of the best books that I have read. The only thing in the book that I never really did understand was who is Alice? Was she someone that people related to during that time period? Was she just a symbol in the book?
As much as it may have impacted people, it is only one of the many horrifying stories of drug addicts that don't make it to see their twentieth birthday.
I hope everyone enjoys this amazing book!
Rating: 5
Summary: Go Ask Alice
Comment: Go Ask Alice is a book about an anonymous person's struggle with life and drugs. "Anonymous" is trying to live up to her parents expectations. When she goes to a party with drinks spiked with LSD, it starts her spiral down into the dark world of drug addiction. The settings change throughout the book from San Fransisco to Boulder. She is an addict on and off. No matter what she always has a friend that has easy access to drugs. Every time she usually comes back home claiming she has changed. Eventually, she always becomes addicted again. In the begining her parents aren't aware of her drug problem but they know near the end. The book ends with a simple statement that leaves you guessing.
I thought Go Ask Alice was truly a remarkable book. It opened my eyes to how precious life is. Fictional or not, I really felt like I knew the characters and I could put my self in there situation. The ending also made me feel moved. It made me realize what a scary effect drugs can have on one persons life. This book can show anyone how to overcome something and change in your life. Overall it was very good and I highly recomend it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful PSA
Comment: 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.
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Title: It Happened to Nancy by Beatrice Sparks ISBN: 0380773155 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: March, 1994 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager by Anonymous, Beatrice Sparks ISBN: 0380791412 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, S. November ISBN: 014131088X Publisher: Puffin Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Cut by Patricia McCormick ISBN: 0439324599 Publisher: Scholastic Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Almost Lost : The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets by Beatrice Sparks ISBN: 038078341X Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: June, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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