Amazon.com Review
2001 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: Fifteen years old and nursing a "serious case of outcastitis," Alice MacLeod is having a hard time finding anything much to like in small town Smithers, British Columbia. Her mom's a folk-festival hippie chick with a hair-trigger temper, her dad's a mild and reasonable sort of loser who hides out in the basement trying to write soft-core romance novels, and her last school counselor threw a teary fit in the middle of a session and left the profession entirely. She'd love to "get past what my father calls my 'knee-jerk dislike of just about anything,'" but she's not sure that there's anything out there that's worth it.
Alice, I Think, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, collects a summer's worth of Alice's journals. The journals are filled with eye-rolling protests at the embarrassments and stupidities she finds herself surrounded with: her mother's drumming-circle friends, the therapeutic jargon her counselors use, the "total rip-off" that the Sea Monkeys offers in the back of comic books turn out to be. But Alice's sharp bark doesn't do much to conceal her lack of a bite. It's her mom, after all, not Alice, who gets into a fistfight with Linda, the town's feathered-hair teen thug, while Alice sits cringing in the family car. In fact, Alice has a sweet side, which she makes all the more endearing by getting all squirmy and ashamed whenever she reveals it. As a novel, her story meanders, in the way that journals will, and the jokes are often aimed at easy marks, but Alice's fierce ungainliness, and her unwillingness to surrender it to make her life any easier, make her struggles appealing. --Tom Nissley
From Publishers Weekly
Goethals does a superb turn as Alice, the alienated teen possessed of a biting sarcasm who stars in Juby's frequently hilarious novel. Providing the perfect air of intelligence tinged with teen angst, Goethals gives Alice's journal about her various travails an undercurrent of energy. Alice, who feels like a true misfit, has been home-schooled for years and will soon enter a public high school. Whether she's keenly critiquing her hippie mother's feminist friends (of the armpit-hair-growing, patchouli-wearing ilk), her father's slacker pals or her generally inept teachers and counselors, Alice offers a unique view of common teenage scenarios and complaints. She suffers at the hands of bullies, feels awkward around boys and longs to create a special "look" for herself, just like most kids her age. Her ever-present family is a source of love and comfort as well as embarrassment. But what makes this tale unusual is Alice's ability to see her everyday dramas in the context of a bigger picture of her life. Particularly entertaining are Goethals's spot-on mocking imitations of the overly caring or just plain daffy authority figures in Alice's life. Teens-and adults who remember their own teen years well-will find much to like here, including plenty of pop-culture references. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
