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Book Summary

Reviewed byMonica Wyatt
We never learn her name. She's 15, the daughter of a college professor. She's given LSD at a party and loves it. She dives into the drug world, and soon begins selling to children to pay for her own drugs. She runs away and is again drawn into drugs. She returns home determined to stay clean, but takes drugs one night and hitchhikes to Colorado.

She drifts, sick and in a stoned fog for months, trading sex for drugs. A priest calls her parents and she returns home again, but the druggie students at her school torment her. One puts LSD into some candy and she has a horribly bad trip, ending up imprisoned in a mental hospital. Home again with no desire to return to drugs, she feels hopeful, but fears returning to school. Three weeks after ending her diary she dies of an overdose.

Is It Any Good?

3

Only parents can decide if they want their children to read GO ASK ALICE; they know their children best, and may wish to read the book themselves before deciding. Clearly, the book will be too intense for some: It graphically describes the waking hell into which the main character descends, her heartfelt but futile battles to return home and stay clean, her pleas to God to save her, her trust and love for her family, and her ultimate failure. It socks readers in the gut.

Many realistic young adult books use frank language, but none more so than this book. Purportedly based on the real diary of a middle-class, nice teenage girl who became a drug addict in the 1960s, this story is nothing short of harrowing -- and that's why it works. Teenagers who read the book easily sense that it tells the truth.

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