Go Ask Alice

i've heard a lot of people tell me that they were forced to read this as a drug abuse prevention technique in high school, which makes me sad. my teacher gave me this book and wanted me to look for what was wrong with its message, and that's what makes this book important: to start a conversation about how we market and discuss drug abuse.

giving this book to a child in an attempt to stop them from using hard drugs is a mistake. this (probably entirely fictional) story was written to be something that scares you. scare tactics may work with some kids, but for others it might influence them to do just that. scaring children is not a good way of teaching them. instead, sit them down and talk to them about the facts because, believe it or not, kids can be pretty good at listening when you give them the chance. this is another discussion for another day, but i just want everyone to stop and think for a moment before they give this to a kid. it might not have the effect you want.

as a book, something read for pleasure, i derived absolutely no pleasure from having read this. i spent however many weeks reading this for a class assignment, and as much as i enjoyed criticizing this work and what it's used for in academia, i did not enjoy reading it. it scared me, but felt unrealistic all the while, and there was nothing that characterizes good literature in here. read if you want to know the controversy but otherwise skip so as not to waste your time.

Spoiler free section

I did not like this book. I found that the main character was relatively easy to get invested in, at least a little bit. That's honestly what kept me reading the book. I wanted her to succeed in life, and wanted to find out what happened to her. That being said, there were so many problematic things in this book that were not treated as problematic which made reading it very bad. Without going into details, there were disordered eating thoughts which were glossed over, as well as blatant homophobia. (If you have a history of restrictive eating disorders, I would be very wary of reading this book, as I have that kind of history, and the book was slightly triggering.) I thought the characters were flat and boring as well. There weren't really any characters that were developed apart from the main character, which I guess isn't too big of a problem, but it still kind of annoyed me. Additionally, the story was quite hard to follow sometimes.

SPOILERS

Okay, really.

WHAT was that ending???? I really can't deal with that. I get that this book is meant to show the dangers of drugs, but that was just absolutely horrible. You can't just have your character go through a full “redemption” arc, pretty much twice, and have then just kill them without warning.

All right, now that I got that off my chest, I found the fact that the disordered eating thoughts at the beginning were not addressed later in the book to be very disheartening. I know this was written well before eating disorders were studied (and they still need to be studied more thoroughly than they have been), but the amount of restrictive eating that happened in the beginning and then the utter lack of restricted thoughts in the last 2/3rds of the book was weird. Eating disorders don't just go away, and I thought the way the book handled that subject matter was very inadequate and harmful.

Honestly, all I can say for this book was that it was short and relatively engaging.