I could not have been more wrong. Not every addict in the world put themselves there. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth -- and ultimately her life. When Go Ask Alice was published, it was what was within the contents of the pages that caused the stir. She had nothing to do with the book. Nilsen wrote that Sparks now wanted to be seen as the author of the popular Go Ask Alice in order to promote additional books in the same vein that she had published or was planning to publish.
I couldn't stand the narrator, I felt no connection with her and despised most of her views. You will never forget her. There she learns just how good she's always had it compared to some of the other addicts in her program. And is shelved in our non-fiction section. Now that I know it isn't a true story, I don't really have anything good to say about it. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city.
Upon its publication, almost all contemporary reviewers and the general public accepted it as primarily authored by an anonymous teenager. The diarist's former friends harass her at school and threaten her and her family. More recent analyses have expressed ethical concerns with the book's presentation of fiction to young readers as a true story. In the 1970s, the book was removed from school libraries in Kalamazoo, Mich. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do. This process becomes a cyclical pattern for Alice: She gets clean and vows to never touch drugs again; then she— oops—finds drugs and enters a spiral of self-harm, drug abuse, and prostitution; eventually she gets tired of being hungry, poor, and taken advantage of and calls home to be rescued yet again by her patient, loving family.
Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide 1995 ed. When her father's new job causes her family to move across the country, Alice is thrust into a new school at a time when she is at best sensitive, and at worst extremely insecure. This story is an honest account of a young person finding themselves accidentally in the world of addiction. The attempts to sound like an innocent girl and a jaded junkie are hackneyed and incompetent. Remember, a diary is not meant for the eyes of anyone other than the diarist, so the writing style used tends to be far more casual than that employed in pieces intended to be read by others.
God hates these things, therefore God is on my side! Retrieved 2017-01-05 — via Newspapers. We are all entitled to our opinions and I understand some may not like it. It now strikes me as a period piece, very much like an afterschool special of the same era i. The reader is supposed to accept that a girl who can't figure out how a doctor can tell if a girl is a virgin, would, a relatively short time later, be using language out of a Henry Miller novel. It delivers a false message and I wonder how many kids could really relate to it today. Boston: The Horn Book Inc.
I read this book when I was fifteen. Even as a 12-year-old, however, it was obvious to me that every si This book is crap on its own. But this book didn't do anything productive. Geneve muss sich entscheiden: Behält sie ihre Neutralität bei oder nimmt sie den Kampf gegen die Bedrohung auf? In some parts it's really graphic and depressing, with no hope for a future. On the book, Sparks is listed as the editor, but a preface still states it is the real diary of a real teenager.
Though purported to be the real diary of a 15-year-old girl who became addicted to drugs during the 1960's, Go Ask Alice is actually a work of fiction. When the girls walk in on Richie and Ted stoned and having sex with each other, they realize their boyfriends were just using them to make money. In an article by Nilsen, based in part on interviews with Sparks and published in the October 1979 issue of , Sparks said that she had received the diaries that became Go Ask Alice from a girl she had befriended at a youth conference. Producing reliable fact-checking and thorough investigative reporting requires significant resources. It's not long before she's experimenting with more and more drugs and it starts affecting all areas of her life.
Names, dates, places and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those concerned. It was written back when conservatives thought they needed to fictionalize drug abuse in order to frighten teenagers. Needless to say, a horrific violation of trust, and a flat refusal to offer anything but trite, simplistic answers in the face of monumental grief and loss. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. Go Ask Alice is one of about seven diaries of anonymous teenagers edited by Sparks with Jay's Journal even having the same cover, but with a boy instead , who also is apparently a Mormon youth counselor. You watch a fifteen-year-old spiral out of control, and there is nothing you can do to help her.
Overall, I say read it more for its historical value than anything else. When I was reading the book, the only redeeming quality was the fact that I thought it was a real story. Go Ask Alice teaches you what can happen when you get into drugs and its hard to stay away from them once you have started and know how easy it is to get ahold of them. By July 20, she was using intravenous drugs. Can a bad trip be permanently dangerous to a person's sanity? If there is one thing that always upsets me in fiction, it is any tragedy involving the elderly; this has always bothered me. First of all it just seemed unlikely that a drug addict would constantly write in a diary and keep it with her all the time.
These were the experiences of the cooler older teenagers, we thought. As city kids though, drugs and alcohol were readily available. In all honesty, I was drawn at eight or nine by Alice's drug use, sex, and profanity. It amuses me that this book regularly appears on banned book lists because it's purpose is not to encourage drug use; just the opposite. No, I can't say it is and I've seen better telling of this type of story.