"Go Ask Alice"

With my student-teaching semester quickly approaching, I've been struggling to juggle the responsibilities of moving to a new place, everyday life, and my high expectations for my knowledge base for the semester. If nothing else, I'll at least force myself through the reading that the students will hopefully engage in during the course of the semester. I've just - and I literally mean just - finished the book Go Ask Alice that is part of the reading list that my cooperating teacher has provided for me. Though I feel as if my high school and college careers have left me fairly well-versed in literature, this is one of the texts that I am not familiar with due to my affinity for the classics and "big name" authors. Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Miller's The Crucible are the two that I will be most familiar with, as I read them in high school as well, and I will have some knowledge base for Knowles's A Separate Peace from my encounter with it in junior high and not long ago in field observations. It is the newer works - Go Ask Alice, The Contender, and Swallowing Stones - that I have no knowledge of their existence, let alone their content and value as literary works.

The reference is really no surprise...

For those who may not have read Go Ask Alice, it's a short but chilling tale of a teenager's struggle with drug addiction after being introduced to it without her knowledge. The unnamed female narrator begins the tale as a mousy, "square" girl who has the usual worries of boys, popularity, sex, and physical appearance, until she is invited to a party where she unknowingly drinks a glass of cola laced with LSD. From there, the narrator begins an "on again, off again" struggle with the dangers and strife that come with habitual drug use and recovery. These struggles land her living with her grandparents, clear across the country struggling to live, being raped by a rich woman and her boyfriend, in a homeless shelter, and in a mental hospital, to name just a few. The writing style is an easy read, as it is claimed to have been based on the actual diaries of a teenage girl, but the content is harrowing for the reader. There is little time in between the jumps from the narrator's love/hate relationship with drugs. For a cluster of pages she is a heroine who is fighting "the Establishment" by not conforming, but quickly falls back into missing her life at home. Once back, she is eager to begin her life anew after her experiences but always seems to be brought back to misery by her life, drugs, and finally her reputation. The book ends with no real conclusion, suggesting a new start for the narrator, but provides a disturbing epilogue that leaves nothing but questions.

This book may seem like heavy reading for high school students, but these worlds are very real and extremely tempting to them. They will only increase in temptation when the majority of them travel to college and live away from home for the first time in their lives. Aside from a "scared straight" use, the novel also presents the students with a surprising amount of challenges in literature. For one, the book is written as if the reader is the narrator's diary and is receiving each entry. This makes the book written in a heavily bias, first-person, stream-of-consciousness format that often leaves the reader wondering if the narrator is lying or exaggerating as well as moments where tremendous amounts of time seem to have passed, but only a few weeks have due to a lack of accurate dates. The first-person narration also provides the issue of the narrator's bias. Unlike works such as Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the narrator is detailing the events in her life as they occur, and not some time later. Therefore, the narrator has all the bias of a teenage female during the drug era of the 1970's in America. However, the narrator's absence of a name makes the character seem akin to seemingly any teenager who might experience these very common feelings, hardships, or "tough decisions." In total, this novel is certainly going to bring a gloomy atmosphere when reading it with the students, but will certainly provide the students with the passion needed to analyze the literature for it's strengths, weaknesses, purpose, and morals.