#35- Go Ask Alice By Anonymous

#35- Go Ask Alice

Rating- 8/10

My favorite kind of book to read are those in first person, even more so those in diary format. I feel a connection to the character and really enjoy hearing a story in that way. For those reason Go Ask Alice was a very easy read for me.

The book follows a girl who has your typical family situation, a mother a father, little siblings, she goes to school in a suburban town and has her best friends she has known all her life.

Then one summer everything changes. Her friends are all busy with boyfriends and vacations and such and she feels somewhat lost until a new group invites her to hang out. She goes to their house to hang out and they play a game called "Button, Button, Who's Got The Button". At the time she doesnt know what it is, later she finds out that her soft drink was spiked with LSD.

From that point on she goes down a spiral path of drugs, leaving home, going back, traveling all over california and meeting new and exciting but dangerous people. She writes throughout her good times and bad times until she is drugged again for her last time and sent to a hospital. The acid trip was bad and she has clawed all over herself and is deemed to be mentally unstable and sent to an institution. 

The last few days of the journal she at home, feeling happy with her family, and very happy with the boy that she is dating. She even directly says that she has high hopes for her future. Then, as the book cover tells us, the epilogue lets us know that several weeks after that entry she has overdosed and died.

I found the books ending to be very confusing, but I guess it makes sense that it is confusing because addiction never makes sense. I could think of a million different reasons why she decided to do drugs again, maybe her boyfriend dumped her. Or her father stopped believing in her, or her siblings were giving her a hard time. I really dont know the answer. It makes me sad that even after going through treatment and feeling like she had a life worth living she died.

I think its an eye-opening book and one that is worth reading even just to realize the power that drugs can hold over people.

“I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot!”