Customer Reviews

What To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If only they had books like this when I was young...I may have enjoyed history. This is a great book...and a great subject. Alice is hilarious and independent...and the illustrations are as colorful and entertaining as her antics are. A great book for young girls...encourages independence, curiousity, humor, and adventure. Don't miss this one!

If Ms. Kerley chose to write about a spirited, happy child in the context of a political time, she succeeded in making it fun and funny, so I guess that's good. But boy, did she misrepresent Alice.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was an unhappy person, with problems that would resonate with today's kids. A miserably "blended" family, a distant but overachieving father who never even mentioned her mother's name after her death--since it was also Alice, it was a constant source of pain--her perkiness is easily seen as acting out.

It's as if a book about the Titanic emphasized how much FUN it was to be on a GREAT BIG party boat, and how WONDERFUL it was that that sinking led to great changes in SAFETY procedures. It's not technically a lie that the Titanic had some fun times, but you're missing the point if that's what you emphasize.

It pains me to write this, since I am in favor of books that humanize long-gone historical figures for kids, and this book is a lot of fun. If it's fun you want, this is a good choice. It does seem to be that history can be fun and also be accurate, and that this could have been a better book than it is.

My granddaughters are 5 and 6 years old and they wanted it read several times. It was and is a big hit. Liz

No one as interesting as Alice Roosevelt Longworth was can be all good, and she wasn't. I would recommend her biography to my granddaughter but she's not old enough to understand the big words. Nor some of the things Alice did with men other than her husband. So I bought this book based on the review I saw in the New York Times as a means of stimulating my granddaughter's interest (as she gets older) in reading the adult biography. Because, this book encapsulates Alice's life in as close to real life as you'd want your grand children to read in their innocent years. Plus the illustrations are amusing, too.

Barbara Kerley's WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALICE? receives Edwin Fotheringham's fun and large drawings as it tells of Theodore Roosevelt's child Alice, who is always causing trouble in the White House as she seeks adventure. The biography celebrates an unusual American heroine and offers a fun look at behind-the-scenes Presidential life.

The story was very disappointing, just a description of Alice's life in the Whitehouse. It started out describing her as independent & not fitting in & then went on to describe how she grew up to fit the traditional roles. Nothing fun or inspirational in here.