Book Review : Go Ask Alice

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorHigh School, 11th grade February 2008

download word file, 3 pages 0.0

Downloaded 1672 times

This book tells a diary written form of a story, about an anonymous girl who lived under the influence of drugs in the 60:ties. The book begins from the first page of a newly bought diary, and follows through her experienses and emotions for a year, mostly of her drug abuse. The book is extremely realistic and seems like it realy is taken from a true diary. The "writer" of this book/diary is a 15-year old girl from a decent family background, who gets involved in the ´colourfull´life of drugs that will turn her life up side down and inside out. The main character is an anonymous girl who is the writer of the journal. She is a typical teen with typical worries, untill the day she gets drugs messed up in her ´not so typical anymore´life. You really have to read the book to get to know this girl and the way she feels.

Mom & Dad are all in all good parents. They are extremely worried about their daughters well being and try to support her as best they can, Tim & Alex are the little sibligs to "the main character, I´m going to call her Alice". Tim is her little brother and Alex´s her little sister. Roger was her first crush. Beth Baum is a jewish girl, who became her first friend in the new town where they moved. Chris is a slightly older girl who is also involved in drugs. They became friends and she experiences much with her. Richie & Ted are two college students. They are the firs among to use "Alice" and Chris for selling drugs for them. Joel Reems is a freshman who "Alice" met in the library one day. She likes him and maybe even lives him. He is clean and shows clearly his adoration towards her. The gras gang is a bunch of kids who try to harass her to go back to "buisiness" when they hear she declared herself clean. Babbie is a 13-year old girl she met in the mental hospital. Babbie inspired her to want to help other drug addicts. The story of the book "Go Ask Alice" is about a 15-year old girl who lives a normal life with a good family and a good up-bringing. She is worried about her looks, grades, popularity, weight and so on. In her ecitement to be accepted, she plays a game at a party called "button, button whos got the button". She doesn´t know the game but plays along anyway. Everybody sits in a ring and drink coca cola from cans that are served. Not until it´s too late she discovers that some of the sodas contained LSD tablets and she was the "lucky" one who got one of them. After this she gets curious and tries some different drugs like speed, acid and pot. After her experimenting, she swore tat she´ll never do it again, but that´s where things went downhill. During the book she meets quite a lot of people, most of them other drug users. She runs away from home twice and under these periods she gets beaten up, raped, has to sleep outdoors, doing blowjobs in exchange for drugs and so on. She eventually returns back home both times and tries to stay clean and good. Unfortunately her old "grass gang" won´t leave her alone and she winds up in a mental hospital for getting a panick attack from cocain that was put on some peanuts by the grass gang when she was babysitting. After getting out from there and befriending with some other kids from who she met there, she was inspired to be a social worker and help other kids with drug problems. Everything seems to move for the better and you think that the book will give a happy ending untill you you read the epilogue where it says that after three weeks of her decision of not to write a diary anymore, she died from an overdose. It doesn´t say if it was accidental or premeditated. The book is avery well written story of a young girl´s life 40 years ago in a diary form and once you start reading this book you can´t seem to get your fingers off it. A touching story of a girl and her strugle to overcome her addiction.