Customer Reviews

All Alone in the Universe

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There's not a whole lot that happens in this book--it's basically an account of how one girl gets dumped by her best friend and then gets over the heartbreak of being cast aside.

But the book is an amazing little gem, both funny and sad and full of casual profound moments that the narrator comes upon in really natural ways. The prose is sharp and funny and nicely complemented by the author's hilarious pictures.

The best compliment I can pay to the work is to say that I wish I'd read this book when *I* was thirteen and coping with the painful fact that my best friend and I had grown apart. It would have made a world of difference to me. A great book. Enough said.

All Alone in the Universe is for anyone who remembers middle school as torture, often at the hands of peers. It's also for people living through middle school right now. (To whom I say: survive. Things will get better.)

The basic story line isn't much. Debbie and Maureen have been best friends since third grade, and now Maureen is moving on, leaving Debbie behind - and alone. Debbie records this with a great deal of insight and wisdom, and almost painful honesty. She also throws in nifty illustrations and a lot of small vignettes, some of which are very funny, all of which demonstrate the way people, sometimes strangers, can change your life.

Debbie is helped through her crisis by lots of unexpected people - a gardener and his employer, her English teacher, a girl her own age even more outcast than herself - and learns that some small acts of kindness can have an effect out of proportion to the effort required to make them. The message is twofold: you can live through change and loss. And we can all help others sometimes - and we all need help sometimes.

This is a small book with surprising depth. Buy it for the middle-schooler in your life, but be sure to read it for yourself, too.

All Alone in the Universe was a book almost everyone could relate to because it could really happen. It is a realistic fiction story about a girl who loses her best friend to another best. When Debbie, the friendless girl, is left in the dust, she realizes how lucky she was to have friends. It is about how she has to start over and finds out ther ARE other peole who care about her. While she is going through this, Debbie feel all alone in the universe, hence the title. I would recommend this book to kids who are having troubles. It really helps people realize how lucky they really are and realize that it isn't the end of the world have an obstacle gets in the way. It shows how to overcome that obstacle, even if it's not easy. It was a good book and once I started I couldn't stop. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, because it was an easy read. To find out the end of this book, read it for yourself.

As a middle school teacher teaching at an all-girls school, I found this book incredible. Adolescence is a time of turmoil within self and friendships, and this book is very realistic. I see friendships crumble almost daily. I see the girls who get hurt and the girls who do the hurting.

This book may just make the breaking up of a friendship easier to bear. It's so good, I plan to read it to my summer school class.

This is a good book. The characters are funny and real, the dialouge is good, the pictures add to the story instead of taking away from it, and it has a way of appealing to how real people think. Yet...it has no plot.

Lynne Rae Perkins set the stage for a novel perfectly. Her main character Debbie is likable and the narrative is well done. But this book never takes off. The main problem in the plot is Debbie's friends Maureen growing closer to another girl and leaving Debbie, but it isn't handled like a disaster. The reader feels detatched from Debbie's reactions- and the reactions themselves seem vague and fuzzy, as if everything's occuring to Debbie too late.

All Alone In The Universe reads like a series of short stories divided into chapters. I read it in one afternoon and did like it, but there's no satisfaction in reading it. Subplots like Marie and Bobby's situations and Debbie's mother's picking up the hitchhiker are opened up but then trickle away into nothing as if the author forgot about them. It doesn't read like a novel should, completely lacking in some sort of climax. Yet I liked it, and it still managed to be gripping. Debbie's musings at the beginning of the book seemed annoying- but in the end that's what the entire novel is about how she views the world and what she discovers. Any fan of action or adventure will want to veer far away from this one, but it's perfect for those that like to read about real life and how people see it.

This is a great book. Some of the other reviews surprise me. For the record it's a children's book - how someone could miss that and then proceed to post a moderate review speaks for itself. All Alone in the Universe tells the story of an all too familiar childhood experience where friendships at times are lost to others. I'm reading it with my 11 year old daughter (it is absolutely a young girl's book) who didn't want to begin reading [yet again] at this time when school is closing for summer vacation. After the first two chapters I can't get her to put it down (late bedtimes, etc.) which is okay by me. The book has captivated my daughter as it would any child on the verge of adolescent self-identity. Remember when you learned people grow, change? All Alone in the Universe is a beautifully written re-telling of a universal life experience which is normal, often faultless but nevertheless painful. Read it with your little girl while she is still little.

This book is a quiet and elegant delight. I enjoyed it, and my eleven year old daughter is thoroughly enjoying both the text and the illustrations. (My personal favorites: the Insul-brick drawing and the fake-wood desktop owl face.) Who else but Lynne Rae Perkins would think to render such things!

While "Criss Cross" is causing all the commotion, "All Alone in the Universe", the debut novel of Perkins, is so much better. The story is about a girl named Debbie just hitting her teen years. With everything that's happening to her, she has a best friend to talk to, right? Not for long. After 140 pages, your heart will be twisted as you watch through Debbie's eyes how her relationship with her best friend ends over one summer. This book is small, but packs a very powerful punch, leaving you to ponder, "What would you do at a time like this?"

My sister and I listened to this story on the way up to Minnesota, and we both agreed that it was a nice change of pace for "lost-friendship-teen-angst" type stories. For one thing, the main character had a good home life. Debbie was not dealing with drugs, abusive parents, divorce or any of the other calamaties that can happen in life. For another, Debbie's emotions seemed real--not forced or contrived. She was allowed to dislike the other girl in the triangle. I did find the writing to be a bit overly descriptive (though her descriptions were fun), and because we were listening, the chapter breaks were a little disconcerting. But Hope Davis did a marvelous job reading, and anyone looking for realistic teen fiction, try this one!

I am an Orthodox Jew with a large family, and I took this book out for my 11 year old daughter, and I started reading it and couldn't put it down. Then my wife read it and couldn't put it down. There's a lot of wisdom here. It reminded me a bit of the introspection of Catcher in the Rye, but it was brighter and more current, of course. It's about relationships, how we can see each other forming a network of mutual helpers. I and my wife loved it.