A review by kori_krc
Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks

2.0

I'm not sure if it was the book or how it was sold to me. This was marketed as a harrowing, in depth look into a teenagers dissent into drug addiction. However, it felt really tame. I liked the format of journal entries to tell a story, but other than that, the story fell really flat for me. The narrator was pretty annoying, and it didn't really seem like she had too many repercussions for her drug use. Her parent's never pushed her to get help or punished her for literally running away for MONTHS, she still got to go to school whenever she came back with no issues with enrollment or her grades or anything, she had no real repercussions with the law (despite her short stint in a rehab/mental hospital due to people at school drugging her and then lying to police about it). I also found it hard not really knowing when this was set. We got months, but no years. I am assuming it was the 50's-70's but it had a lot of homophobic language (which if you take it for the time period that I'm assuming it was set in, I guess? But it just seemed really unnecessary to add in, as it didn't really further the plot and wasn't necessary to the narration?). I think if this was any longer, I would have seriously thought about putting it down and never picking it back up, but since it was only about 200 pages, I struggled through. I just couldn't help but roll my eyes with every entry. The main character was just very immature, and while I understand she was only 15 at the start of the book, her writing nor her storytelling ever got any better. I might be expecting too much for what it was, I just feel a little slighted that I was expecting this intense trip through a teenaged girl's fall into drugs, but what I got was this.