Alice, I Think - Softcover

Juby, Susan

3.4

2,055 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006392873 ISBN 13: 9780006392873

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2003

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Alice lives in Smithers, a small logging town in Canada, with her mother, father, and ten-year-old brother MacGregor. She attends the Smithers Teens in Transition (Not in Trouble) centre, and is now up to therapist number two, Death Lord Bob.

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Review:

2001 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: Fifteen years old and nursing a "serious case of outcastitis," Alice MacLeod is having a hard time finding anything much to like in small town Smithers, British Columbia. Her mom's a folk-festival hippie chick with a hair-trigger temper, her dad's a mild and reasonable sort of loser who hides out in the basement trying to write soft-core romance novels, and her last school counselor threw a teary fit in the middle of a session and left the profession entirely. She'd love to "get past what my father calls my 'knee-jerk dislike of just about anything,'" but she's not sure that there's anything out there that's worth it.

Alice, I Think, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, collects a summer's worth of Alice's journals. The journals are filled with eye-rolling protests at the embarrassments and stupidities she finds herself surrounded with: her mother's drumming-circle friends, the therapeutic jargon her counselors use, the "total rip-off" that the Sea Monkeys offers in the back of comic books turn out to be. But Alice's sharp bark doesn't do much to conceal her lack of a bite. It's her mom, after all, not Alice, who gets into a fistfight with Linda, the town's feathered-hair teen thug, while Alice sits cringing in the family car. In fact, Alice has a sweet side, which she makes all the more endearing by getting all squirmy and ashamed whenever she reveals it. As a novel, her story meanders, in the way that journals will, and the jokes are often aimed at easy marks, but Alice's fierce ungainliness, and her unwillingness to surrender it to make her life any easier, make her struggles appealing. --Tom Nissley

About the Author:

SUSAN JUBY is the author of the critically acclaimed Getting the Girl and Another Kind of Cowboy, as well as the bestselling Alice series (Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last) and her latest novel for adults, The Woefield Poultry Collective. After dropping out of fashion college and attaining a BA from the University of British Columbia, Susan went to work in the book industry. She holds a master’s degree in publishing. She currently lives on Vancouver Island with her husband, James, and their dog, who prefers to remain anonymous. Visit her online at susanjuby.com.

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