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meghanng's review
3.0
Such a fun little series. I will miss spending time with Alice and her wonderfully weird adventures. She's so self centered in the funniest way a teenager can be. A character I will remember!
missprint_'s review
5.0
There are many reasons this review was posted late and backdated which I won't get into here. Suffice to say I have been meaning to write this review for months but have been putting it off because I knew that once I wrote the review I would have to admit that Alice's adventures were done--no small task let me assure you.
Onward . . .
Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last (2006) is the stunning conclusion to Susan Juby's debut trilogy (preceeded by Alice, I Think and its sequel Miss Smithers). You might recognize Juby's name from the 2009 Edgar Awards where Getting the Girl was a nominee.
This installment opens with the first scene from Alice's screenplay "Of Moose and Men"--a creative work loosely based on her own life. Excerpts of the screenplay are sprinkled throughout the novel. The writing is overwrought, exaggerated, and provides hysterical insight into Alice's psyche throughout the story. In addition to being Alice's latest career of choice, writing her screenplay also helps this sixteen-year-old heroine make sense of the chaos that has become her life.
At the beginning of the story, Alice's boyfriend Goose is moving with his family to Glasgow for an entire year only to go away to university on the other end of Canada when he finally returns. Dealing with this heartbreak is bad enough on its own. Then Alice's mother, a somewhat aggressive environmentalist, is thrown in jail as a result of her activist activities. That leaves Alice, her younger brother, and her father on their own. To say that this development leaves the family less than functional would be a vast understatement.
The one constant in Alice's life seems, ironically, to be Death Lord Bob--her ineffectual therapist from the Teens in Transition (Not Trouble) Center in town. At least until he too is called away leaving Alice with the surly Ms. Deitrich who doesn't seem to understand anything about Alice's life let alone her highly evolved sense of style.
With their matriarch breadwinner in jail Alice and her father find themselves, for the first time, looking for gainful employment. Alice's job search, and eventual employment, throw her into the paths of two brilliant characters: Wallace and Vince. Negotiating these new romantic waters, Alice finds herself caught between two equally charming suitors--one five years her senior, the other considerably her junior. The dilemma is equally difficult for readers who will likely be as attracted to these guys as Alice herself.
Throughout the series, readers are able to trace Alice's evolution as a character. The girl we meet in this novel is very different from the Alice entering a traditional school (or a beauty pageant) for the first time. She is more mature, and in some ways more responsible and engaged with the world at large. More than that, though, Alice's true depth as a heroine is really apparent in this story as she not only works through but even rises above all of the (screw)balls life throws at her.
Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last doesn't qualify as truly "realistic" fiction because of the humor and general madness that surrounds Alice. But Alice is still an utterly real and engaging character with a quirky sense of humor (and style) that will leave readers smiling.
(I'd recommend reading the entire trilogy in sequence to fully appreciate how awesome it is, but the stories do stand alone fairly well if you happen upon them out of order.)
Onward . . .
Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last (2006) is the stunning conclusion to Susan Juby's debut trilogy (preceeded by Alice, I Think and its sequel Miss Smithers). You might recognize Juby's name from the 2009 Edgar Awards where Getting the Girl was a nominee.
This installment opens with the first scene from Alice's screenplay "Of Moose and Men"--a creative work loosely based on her own life. Excerpts of the screenplay are sprinkled throughout the novel. The writing is overwrought, exaggerated, and provides hysterical insight into Alice's psyche throughout the story. In addition to being Alice's latest career of choice, writing her screenplay also helps this sixteen-year-old heroine make sense of the chaos that has become her life.
At the beginning of the story, Alice's boyfriend Goose is moving with his family to Glasgow for an entire year only to go away to university on the other end of Canada when he finally returns. Dealing with this heartbreak is bad enough on its own. Then Alice's mother, a somewhat aggressive environmentalist, is thrown in jail as a result of her activist activities. That leaves Alice, her younger brother, and her father on their own. To say that this development leaves the family less than functional would be a vast understatement.
The one constant in Alice's life seems, ironically, to be Death Lord Bob--her ineffectual therapist from the Teens in Transition (Not Trouble) Center in town. At least until he too is called away leaving Alice with the surly Ms. Deitrich who doesn't seem to understand anything about Alice's life let alone her highly evolved sense of style.
With their matriarch breadwinner in jail Alice and her father find themselves, for the first time, looking for gainful employment. Alice's job search, and eventual employment, throw her into the paths of two brilliant characters: Wallace and Vince. Negotiating these new romantic waters, Alice finds herself caught between two equally charming suitors--one five years her senior, the other considerably her junior. The dilemma is equally difficult for readers who will likely be as attracted to these guys as Alice herself.
Throughout the series, readers are able to trace Alice's evolution as a character. The girl we meet in this novel is very different from the Alice entering a traditional school (or a beauty pageant) for the first time. She is more mature, and in some ways more responsible and engaged with the world at large. More than that, though, Alice's true depth as a heroine is really apparent in this story as she not only works through but even rises above all of the (screw)balls life throws at her.
Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last doesn't qualify as truly "realistic" fiction because of the humor and general madness that surrounds Alice. But Alice is still an utterly real and engaging character with a quirky sense of humor (and style) that will leave readers smiling.
(I'd recommend reading the entire trilogy in sequence to fully appreciate how awesome it is, but the stories do stand alone fairly well if you happen upon them out of order.)
finesilkflower's review
3.0
This book is weird. I can't even really tell if I like it or not. On a sentence-to-sentence level, it's clever and funny, but the story doesn't seem to hold together that well. It seems like it wants to be a funny hijinks/vignette-based plot: Alice spends the summer having various ridiculous jobs and inappropriate romance-lets, reading letters from her hippie mom who is in prison for starting a riot, writing crazy emails to her ex where she talks about how over him she is (and then deleting them), and of course, writing entries in her insane, Mary Sue screenplay. All of those things have a lot of comedy POTENTIAL, and while the way Alice describes them is generally funny, the actual events of the 'jinks are just a little too bleak and sad. They're sort of amusingly described lowjinks.
caseythecanadianlesbrarian's review
4.0
I'm sad that my re-read of these YA books, a teenage favourite of mine, is over! They are so funny and so real. Juby does a great job writing lovable oddballs. In this book Alice says goodbye to her first boyfriend Daniel aka Goose, deals with her mom being in jail after charges related to an environmental protest, tries out multiple summer jobs (none of which she is qualified for), and fends off a 14-year-old goth crushing on her (nicely) and a creepy older guy (not nicely, as he deserves).
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