A review by anjreading
Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

3.0

Reading this on Serial Reader over the space of 29 days gave me plenty of time to ponder the novel. There's no doubt the actual writing is good. The constant racial slurs (which had zero impact on the story and were completely unnecessary) are tough to get through; I don't care about judging a book for the time it was written in, etc., this was unacceptable and painful to read, so much so that I struggled with whether to just DNF it. If you can set that aside (not sure I can), you will alternately loathe, pity, and admire plucky Alice in her quest to rise out of her social class. By the end of the novel, Tarkington won me over to his heroine, something I was not expecting. Alice's mother, not so much. I have conflicted feelings about this book.

*1921 pick for my century reading project 1921-2020