The Late Great Me [Mass Market Paperback]

Sandra Scoppettone (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Bantam Books (1978)
• ISBN-10: 0553120336
• ISBN-13: 978-0553120332
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,005,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hit Close To Homw, February 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Late Great Me (Hardcover)

Being a teenage alcoholic myself, this book captured all the exact features like the writer lived it. It does indeed warn about the dangers of alcoholism, but brought back many a memeroies and sips of the bottle. I would 100% recommend it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended!!!, January 8, 2003

By 

Niesha Moses (Woodside, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Late Great Me (Paperback)

I was thirteen the time I read this book and it truly made me understand a lot about alcoholism and how life can be in general for many who suffer from this disease. More than twelve years later this book still remains one of my favorite. I can't tell you how many times I have read it or will continue to read it. I recommend it to almost everyone I know, especially young people. It is definitely a worthwhile book that will make you feel many different emotions from humor to sadness.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The allure of alcohol, December 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Late Great Me (Paperback)

I highly recommend this book, not because it's a morality play, but because it's devastatingly honest and REAL. When readers say the characters seemed so real they jumped off the page, THIS is the book they're talking about.

Geri Peters is a painfully shy, sensitive teenager who wishes she knew how to be talkative and confident like the popular girls at school, and to be at ease with attractive boys. Her situation is only made worse by her hypercritical mother Ginger, who constantly relates stories of her own popularity in high school, and berates Geri for being a "heartbreak" to her. Geri only associates with 2 close friends, deemed losers by Ginger. To add insult to injury, Geri's older brother Jack is the most popular guy in his class, being a star athlete, musician, actor and honor roll student. Actually, it seems more than a little unrealistic that having a brother like Jack wouldn't have opened doors for Geri as far as her popularity in high school, but Scoppettone clearly wants to show how much of a self-loathing failure Geri feels like because she doesn't have a thriving social life.

In any case, Geri is ripe for anything to change her bleak situation, and her opportunity arrives on the first day of school, when a handsome new guy, Dave, talks to HER. She despairs that Dave will consider her a freak after meeting her 2 best friends, Carolyn & B. J., but Dave is undeterred. In fact, Dave turns down dates and invitations from the most popular girls in school to be with Geri. Geri is mystified by this until she and Dave go on their first date and Dave produces a bottle of wine. Dave likes to party, and as it turns out, his home life is a shambles; therefore, his goal is finding someone as vulnerable as himself, who wouldn't shun him, like the snobs. This, too, seems a bit strange, since there are clearly many attractive girls who are not popular, and who drink heavily, and who wouldn't snub Dave because of his parents, such as the female "juicers" (heavy drinkers) at Walt Whitman High. Maybe Dave sensed that there lurked a charming, witty interior underneath Geri's tongue-tied, fumbling exterior.

Anyway, Geri finds that she, like Dave, also falls in love with the high that alcohol provides. To her, it's a magic potion that erases her shyness, vulnerability, and self-criticism. As alcohol becomes less of an occasional kick and more of a necessity in her life, she disregards the troubles and unhappiness caused by her drunkenness, because the feeling of euphoria is too good to resist. Soon she finds that the advantages and disadvantages to drinking heavily are the same: you don't care about anything. The rest of the book consists of Geri fighting that ol' debil alcohol in spite of her initial attraction to it.

What makes this story different from the typical "Portrait of a Teen Alcoholic" are, as noted, the characters. Geri in particular is a likeable, humorous storyteller; her narration keeps the novel from getting too maudlin and preachy. Her descriptions of everything, especially the pecking order at school, her mother's superficiality, and her one-horse town, are priceless. And how many novels, let alone YA novels, have interesting adult characters? Ginger Peters is as three-dimensional and complex as her daughter, a woman who wants to go back to the Fifties and remain there as the "All-Round" Popular Girl. She undergoes her own crisis as she witnesses her daughter succumbing to the seductive, hard-drinking "juicer" crowd. The usual elements of the "under-the-influence" stories are contained here: the family fights, new "friends", Geri's lack of interest in school or her former passion (drawing cartoons), tragedies, and finally, the big wake-up call. Scoppettone writes with humor and sensitivity about each episode, showing Geri's gradual decline and reluctance to climb out of the hell she's created.

The only time the novel skirts the edge of preachiness is whenever Geri's mentor, her English teacher by the name of Kate Laine, intervenes. Kate's main purpose in the book is to give the straight facts on alcoholism and endorse AA. She's almost too good and patient to be true, but she's not a saint who lectures or makes judgment calls; she's just there to help Geri. Kate is an alcoholic but that's about all we learn about her. Too bad. It would have been interesting to have more background on her.

Overall, this book should be on all suggested high school reading lists. (If you make it required, they won't want to read it.) The 10-question test Kate gives Geri would help a lot of teens realize that maybe their social drinking isn't as "social" as they think. And most of all, it's funny, heartbreaking and truthful to read, unlike the schlocky reefer madness horror of "Go Ask Alice".