Go Ask Alice

Well, I picked up this book during Banned Books Week, and just finished it.  Not that it was a hard or long read, just that I put it down because I it was disturbing.  But it was getting close to when it was due back to the library, so I powered through it yesterday.  Again, no big feat since it's an easy read and short. 

In a nutshell, this book is about a 15 year old girl who, right off the bat, has serious self-esteem issues and body image issues.  She gets slipped some LSD in a coke while at a party and falls in love with drugs.  She thinks they're glorious and wonderful and that clearly teachers and her parents are wrong about them.  She wants to experiment with more drugs and as she meets people within the drug culture who tell her about the next best high, she goes for it.  Thus she falls down the rabbit hole of drugs.  She does try to get herself out of it a few times, but always goes back to the drugs.

Now the part that didn't quite ring true was the end of the book.  She ends up, once again, accidentally getting dosed with, presumably, high concentrated LSD that was put on chocolate covered peanuts and goes crazy.  This is blamed on the kids in her high school who are still in the drug crowd who want to pull her back in.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  They were THAT upset that she wasn't using/dealing that they drugged her?  To what purpose?

So I don't know what to think of this book, which is why it gets the low rating.

If you take it for what it says it is, an anonymous diary of a 15 year old who falls into drugs, then it is just disturbing. I kept wishing that the inevitable outcomes wouldn't happen, that the girl would be able to stop the downward spiral of her life. If that is the case, I would rate it 3 stars. I didn't love it and do not want to read it again because it's too disturbing. But it was certainly interesting and it kept me turning the pages.

If you don't believe it is a real diary, or based off of one or several diaries of drug addicted teens, and that it is a work of fiction, then it's just baffling. Why pretend to be a real diary when it isn't?  There are plenty of fictional accounts of drug use, but just because they are fictional doesn't take away from the power of their message. The subterfuge just doesn't make sense to me.

Regardless, the book made me so happy that I don't do drugs and that I do not a) have the type of personality that was curious about that stuff and b) have an addictive personality.

Rating: 2 stars