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More reviews by Christine Bruce
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Alice, I Think by Susan Juby
The "Alice" in the title of this book should be its eponymous heroine. So why "I think"? It's just that in her small town, where everyone seems to fit into one stereotype or another, Alice doesn't quite know who she is yet.
ALICE, I THINK is a first-person account of how, from her first day at primary school, when she thought she was a hobbit, to her teenage experimentation with grown-up clothes and make-up, Alice is trying to find an image and a role that she feels comfortable with. The trouble is she has no-one around she wants as a role-model. Her mother and father are ageing flower children, but Alice is no Dharma -- she thinks her mother's friends are "sad, messy hippy chicks" and Alice's sharp "social critic" eye misses none of their foibles. She recounts with sardonic amusement the episode where her mother's pacifist principles are compromised by her hot temper and she ends up in an embarrassing fist fight in the middle of the town with one of Alice's classmates.
Alice has no peer-group either. She's so different that she risks being violently set upon if she ventures into the public eye in her small and somewhat narrow hometown, so she has had to be home-schooled. This means that she has been exposed to lots of her parents' opinions and even more of her parents' alternative friends, but has developed few social skills. At the time of telling, she is about to make her attempt to re-enter the mainstream high school, but with her thrift clothes and disastrous hairdo things are looking unpropitious, especially since it turns out that her grade one nemesis, the damaged and dangerous Linda, still has her in her sights.
The writing is crisp and caustic, a blend of Adrian Mole-type faux naivety and Bridget Jones' angst-ridden wit. Alice's journey back to the mainstream starts in the group named "Teens In Transition" and continues via "Alternative Solutions School", both institutions "with an absolute flair for acronyms" according to her father, with whom she shares her sarcasm. Alice feels herself to be way ahead of her counsellors, and having been the emotional downfall of one, takes care not to trample on the self-esteem of her replacement, Death Lord Bob. In one of the many ironic role-reversals in the book, Alice portrays herself as protecting the well-meaning, right-on and ineffectual counsellor from getting hurt.
In this tale of weird people of one stripe or another, at times the reader is left wondering just how reliable the narrator is. Indeed when she gets a job in an alternative bookshop, her actions become rather unsympathetic. It seems that she does have a rather distorted view of the world, and that she is capable of very insensitive actions. Margaret, who works in the bookstore, is one of the few characters portrayed as being reasonable. She and Alice's little brother Macgregor become the benchmarks of sanity in a book filled with outrageous individuals, including wonderful comic characters in bit parts: Irma the small-town hairdresser, Finn the drunken stylist, and the dreadful Aubrey.
This sharp first novel by SUSAN JUBY is definitely one to amuse cynical teenagers -- and adults.
Christine Bruce
07/12/2003
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Christine Bruce teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the Faculty of Education, She works with teachers of ESL and promotes the teaching of English through literature to introduce language that is interesting and dynamic rather than merely a tool for transacting business. |
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