1.
Anonymous, Go Ask Alice, Aladdin Paperbacks, New York, 1998

2.
The reason that I’ve chosen this book is that I thought, based on reading the back of the book, it would be an interesting and good book.

My first impression of the book was that it is a touching story. While I was reading the book it was like I was also going through everything-I felt as if I was Alice. I read the book in a couple of hours without stopping because I just wanted to know what was going to happen with the girl, with Alice.

3. a.
Alice is a girl who isn’t happy with her life. She hasn’t got many friends. When she hears that they are going to move to another town she’s very happy. IShe immediately goes on a diet. She hopes she’ll get more friends at her new school than she had in her old town. But after the first day at her new school she thinks nobody likes her. Nobody talks to her and she hasn’t got any friends for a while. Then she meets Gerta, a girl who is as clodding and misfitting as she is. Gerta isn’t a very good friend but at least she has a friend. Her brother Tom and sister Alexandria both make friends on the first day, she wishes she was more like them.

One day she meets Beth, a Jewish girl who lives near her. They become very close friends and Alice is very happy with her. But during  the summer holiday Beth is send to a summer camp for six weeks. Alice decides to go to her grandparents who live in her old neighbourhood. The moment she gets there she’s bored. But then she meets Jill. Jill asks Alice if she wants to come to her party that evening. She’s very happy and goes to the party. At the party they play a game-10 out of 14 bottles of coke had LSD in them. At first Alice doesn’t know that, but she receives a bottle with LSD in it. She gets stoned and has a great evening.

After a few days Alice goes out with Bill, a guy she met a Jill’s party. He introduces her to torpedoes and speed. She has a great time. When Gramps gets a little heartattack Alice decides to help her grandparents as much as she can. When Bill calls her to ask if she wants to go out with him Gran says she needs to go out and to have some fun. Alice didn’t want to go, but she couldn’t tell her grandparents that. That night, when she was stoned again, she has sex with Bill. She’s afraid that she’s pregnant.  She wants to go home, but Gran needs her so she can’t go. Then Roger came by, a boy whom she loved her whole life. They become friends and even when she’s home they keep in contact.

The weeks after she comes home she’s very depressed but she can’t tell her parents why. She goes to a doctor who gives her sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Then Alice meets Chris and they become friends. Alice is going to work at the same shop as Chris. Sometimes Chris gives her pep pills. Chris introduces her to two friends of hers, Richie and Ted. Chris is in love with Ted and Alice is in love with Richie. Richie gives her drugs and she’s very happy. She helps Richie as much as she can, she even sells drugs for him at school. One day Chris and Alice go to Ted and Richie and see them laying in bed together. They are very mad. Then they plan to go to San Francisco and they turn Ted and Richie in to the police.

In San Francisco they live in a small and dirty room. After a while they both find a job. Chris has a great job but Alice quits her job to find a better one. She finds a better one where she works with mister Mellani, a Italian guy who owns a jewelry store. They spend a lot of time with Shelia, Chris’ boss. Shelia gives them drugs and after a while they notice that she’s just using them. Then they go somewhere close to Berkeley and open a little boutique where kids stay and chill out.

At Christmas they really miss their families and decide to go back to their parents. They have a great Christmas. At school the kids are nagging her for drugs because they think she’s still on drugs. After a while Chris and Alice start using drugs again but one day they get busted. Her parents watch everything she does, but then suddenly she’s in Denver. She’s doing drugs again and lives nowhere, until she meets Doris and moves in with her. She hasn’t got any clean clothes and is very dirty. They are on drugs for a while (there’s no date above the stuff she writes then) but she decides to go home.

Then diary number two starts, a diary of her ‘new life’.

She’s very happy to be home again and decides never to do drugs again. The kids in school are really hassling her and she doesn’t have any friends. Then Gramps dies and she’s very shocked by it. She has a lot of delusions about Gramps being eaten by worms. Gran moves in with her family. Then she meets Joel, a freshman. Her mum and dad really like Joel and Alice loves him a lot.

She still doesn\'t have any friends accept Joel. One night she has to baby-sit together with a doper. The girl is very stoned and Alice calls her parents. The next day at school they all hate her even more because she called the girl’s parents. Then Gran gets really sick and after a while she dies. Her friendship with Joel gets better every day and the kids aren’t bugging her anymore. Life seems to be better, but one night she has to baby-sit and the next moment she’s in a sort of hospital. There aren’t any dates above the written stuff and she talks mad things about worms eating her and she has scratched her whole body open and pulled her hair out of her head.

After a while she has to go the State Mental Hospital and she’s very afraid. She has to go there because a few dopers told the judge that she still sells drugs. She hates it there and during the first days she doesn’t even talk or eat. After two weeks in there she can leave because her dad got the dopers to tell the truth, the truth being that Alice’s wasn’t selling drugs.

After she’s been home for a couple of days her dad has to go back East for two weeks to finish a lecture course and the family goes with him. They also visit New York and they have a great time. When she is home again life seems to be okay. On her birthday Joel comes over to her house and she’s very happy. She becomes friends with the straight kids and on September 21 she decides to stop writing in her diary. She seems very happy with her family, Joel and her new friends.

There’s an epilogue:
The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary. Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do.

Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows, and in some ways that question isn’t important. What must be of concern is that she died and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.

b.
The main character is Alice. She is very insecure and never had many friends. Sometimes she goes on a diet because she thinks that she’ll have more friends then and that she’ll get popular. She loves her family very much, but she can’t talk to them. She thinks that they don’t understand her, especially her mum. After she’s been on drugs, she wants to help other young people with their problems, so that they won’t do drugs or get straight again. She has a lot of problems.

The story takes place in America. The names of the places aren’t mentioned, but part of the story takes place in San Francisco, where she goes with her friend Chris. She also goes to Denver and Coos Bay. She mentions going to a rally in Southern California and going back East with her family. However, where Gran and Gramps and her family live is not mentioned in the story.

Sometimes she writes down what a place looks like (for example a room), but not very often. When she’s in the State Mental Hospital she describes what her room looks like and the hallway, that makes the story very real, like you’re in there when you read it.
‘Then they took me down a smelly, ugly, dingy, paint-peeling old hallway’
‘She was stretched out stupidly under the pinball machine in the dayroom, and there was also a teen age boy who kept bouncing his head and muttering idiotically’

The story takes place in the 60’s. That’s not mentioned in the book but Iread it somewhere. I don’t think that’s really important for the story because it’s about drugs and not about time and places. It’s an open ended book because Alice has stopped writing in her diary. We don’t know what she thought during the last three weeks of her life or if she died of an accidental overdose or a premeditated overdose.

Sometimes there’s no date above something she’s written. The book says ‘There are no dates for the following material. It was recorded on single sheets of paper, paper bags, etc.’  Sometimes Alice doesn’t even know where she is or when it is.
‘I don’t know what the hell hour or day or even year it is, or even what town.’

The story is a diary written by Alice. So what you read are her words and you see everything through her eyes. Sometimes she has some weird thoughts, especially when she’s using drugs. I thought it was very strange that when she is with her parents when she’s home, she is a neat girl, and when she’s somewhere using drugs, she talks with terrible words and swears all the time. The language she uses is pretty easy. It’s easy to read and there aren’t any complicated words in the book.
- Some of her talks while she was on drugs:
‘Another day, another blow job. The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry. If I don’t give Big Ass a blow job he’ll cut off my supply.’
‘The goddamned rain is even worse than yesterday. It’s like the whole sky is pissing on us.’
‘I felt gentle and drowsy and wonderfully soft like I was floating above reality and the mundane things were lost in forever space.’
‘Two unidentified boys died during the night from O.D.’s. Oh, how I wish one of them had been me!’
- Some of her talks while she was straight:
‘Beth and I have only two more days together. Our parting is almost like looking forward to a death.’
‘Dear Diary, I’m at Gran’s and I have never been more bored in my life.’
‘Now that I have a goal I feel a lot stronger myself. In fact I’m feeling stronger every day.’

There isn’t a main idea in the book, that is because it’s not something written to be a book, but it’s a diary.

I don’t know why the book is called ‘Go Ask Alice’. Maybe it’s because she died and now nobody can ask her anything anymore. Or maybe it’s because Alice has a lot of experience in life even though she is a young girl. She knows a lot about drugs and is a smart girl. And she wanted to help other (young) people after she had finished school, they could ‘ask Alice’.

I think it is a great book. It’s so real it’s like you go through everything yourself. I think it’s very sad to read that such a young, healthy girl starts with using drugs. I like it that it’s a diary because you’ve no idea what’s going to happen. She doesn’t want to use drugs anymore, but is she strong enough? You don’t know it and I didn’t expected her to die; I think that’s really sad. But I’m still wondering what she died of, an accidental overdose or a premeditated overdose. I think it’s a pity that we’ll never find out.

I don’t know very much about the drug scene and not at all about drugs in America. Now I know a little bit about it; that there are so much dopers over there. It scared me a bit that so many kids use drugs when they’re so young.

I would definitely recommend this book to someone else, I think it’s very educational and as The Boston Globe says: ‘A book that all teenagers and parents of teenagers should really read’.