Reluctantly Alice Book

Alice makes it her goal to go her seventh grade year being friends with everyone and having no enemies, but this is quickly spoiled when she becomes the target of bully Denise Whitlock.

As an entry in the ongoing Alice story, this book is strong: it contains some iconic scenes, including Alice freaking out at the "Seventh Grade Sing Day" because she's tone-deaf; Alice looking for pictures of naked men in National Geographic because Elizabeth has never seen a naked man; and Alice inviting her new Language Arts teacher, Miss Summers, to sing with her family at the Messiah Sing-Along (thus sneakily introducing her single dad to the woman he will eventually marry); and Alice boldly choosing her bully as her partner in a group project.

As a standalone novel, however, this one has some faults. It feels like a middle, not a complete story. The ostensible message is muddied by events that are irrelevant or contradictory. We know the intended moral lesson because Alice's dad comes out and states it: that you just can't live your life trying to please everyone, because you'd end up boring and bland and it wouldn't work anyway, so it's better to be yourself and the people who like you the way are your people. This is a fantastic moral lesson, but the events of the book don't exactly support it, since the ending involves Alice making friends with Denise after all. (Plus, in my opinion, Alice's "true self" IS boring and bland. Sorry, Alice.) This message would be much better served by a book about a kid who is "different" in some way but who tries to fold herself into the perfect "normal" person and who suffers the emotional consequences of that. Personally, THAT imaginary book would have been EXTREMELY ON POINT AND USEFUL FOR ME as a child (and an adult). (It occurs to me, though, that that's a highly queer story; Alice is much too inherently normative for it.)

Content Notes: Some elements have not aged well. There is a casual use of the g**** slur, and the storyline about Alice trying to find pictures of naked men in National Geographic has a colonialist sort of flavor to it. Like I have no doubt that 1980s National Geographic magazines DID paint aboriginal men as naked savages, but it still feels weird to a modern sensibility that this book is quite uncritical of that.

Random Observations

* I do like the ending of the Alice-finding-nude-men-pictures-for-Elizabeth story, in which her dad figures out what she is doing and takes her to the library to find books on human anatomy. It's a good example of Ben giving Alice the tools to educate herself about sexuality and puberty in an open, loving, non-sex-shamey way.

* This is the first but certainly not the last Alice book that is equally, if not more, invested in the social lives of Alice's dad and brother than Alice herself. Even before the whole Parent Trap type meeting between Ben and Sylvia, there's a mini storyline where Alice informs her clueless dad that his employee, Janice, is in love with him, which frustrates his attempt to date Janice's friend Helen Lake. Lester, meanwhile, begins juggling both his new girlfriend Crystal and his old girlfriend Marilyn. What's bizarre to me about the Lester storyline, aside from how long it winds up going on (YEARS), is that even at this point, Lester says he would commit to Marilyn if she agreed to become engaged. Lester is 22! People in this series think about marriage WAY too young.

* Alice and Patrick's platonic "special friendship" is pretty charming in this book. They pass notes and comics in History class making fun of their teacher, which, as a person who passed notes and comics making fun of the teacher in my own seventh-grade Social Studies class, feels EXTREMELY relatable and realistic. But the teacher finds and reads one of the notes, and although he doesn't say anything, he's clearly embarrassed and they feel bad, so they team up to do an extra good project to make up for it. It's sweet.

* Alice, Pamela, and Elizabeth wind up in a bizarre sort of social chess game involving making poster-size pictures of each other wearing bubble bath. It's exactly as weird as it sounds.