Go Ask Alice - Carla Brown

I read a book called Go ask Alice, the author is anonymous. The novel is about teenage girls life, and her journal is over the course of two years and a couple days. Her life instantly changed when her family moved to a new town, and she doesn't like the new town at all. Over the summer she went back to her old town to stay with her grandparents. Her and her old friend decided to go to a party. While she was the she got drugged with LSD that was put in everyone’s coco cola bottles as a game. Everyone else had assumed Alice was aware of what the "game” was. After that she tried marijuana, and amphetamines. She thinks the more drugs she does, the more interesting her diaries will be.
         After a pregnancy scare and coming back to her new town she turned away from drugs. Until she got sucked in to a drug crowd and starts dating a drug dealer there in her new town. She found out that he had been using her to sell his drugs; she ran away with her friend and started a boutique. After being raped by her friends boss and her boss’s boyfriend, her and her friend Chris went back home.

         When she came back the community had been treating her different and it was making her want to go back to drugs. So she weakens and runs away high. She starts having sexual relations with strangers and loses track of everything. So she asks a priest to help her get home.

        After coming home AGAIN she vows to stay completely off of drugs. Of course her old friends (the pot heads) are going to judge her because she doesn't want to be a part of that any more. One day Alice was babysitting and was drugged without knowing. While intoxicated she has a violent, bad trip, and while it was happening  her neighbor locks her in the closet, and she gets hurt really bad trying to claw her way out. She had to go to a psychiatric hospital. After she was released she was finally happy and over her drug addiction. She starts a new relationship with a student, Joel, at her dad’s university. She gets her life back on track and finally makes the decision to stop keeping a diary.

Main Characters

Alice: the Anonymous dairy writer that tells us the story about her life.

Diary: This is the journal that “Alice” writes in and tells every detail about her life in. “Alice” wrote “Anyway I feel closer to you than I do to even Debbie ad Marie and Sharon who are my very best friends.” Diary isn’t a character, but it played a big role in “Alice’s” life in how she coped with life around her.

Joel:  He is the first person who gets “Alice” to start trusting people and gets her out of her shell. He can relate to Alice on the aspect of losing family, because he lost his father when he was young. He  doesn't push her about getting to know her every secret and accepts that her drug usage is in the past when he learns that that is why she was in the hospital.

Quotes

"Can't I even have the privacy of my own soul?" p.8.

"I want so much to be someone important, or even just asked out by a boy every once in a while. Maybe the new me will be different." p10.

"I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other..." p16

My opinion

In my opinion I think the book was pretty good actually. I think everybody has had someone they know, whether it’s a family friend or maybe even your family member that has had a problem with drugs. Its not a fun thing to see someone go through. But this book kind of helps you get a better look at the things that drugs can do to you.