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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
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Summary
Summary
Thirteen! It's finally happening. Alice McKinley is an actual, official teenager. But the problem is, she still sort of feels like a kid. Wasn't being a teenager supposed to feel different? Turning thirteen happens overnight, but the teenager stuff takes time--and a little more patience than Alice has at the moment!
Still, being thirteen does have its advantages, she decides. Alice is allowed to do more exciting things, like take a trip to Chicago with her two best friends. And when she takes a good look at all the relationship problems her older brother has, she realizes that in-between can sometimes be the perfect place.
Author Notes
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor was born in Anderson, Indiana on January 4, 1933. She received a bachelor's degree from American University in 1963. Her first children's book, The Galloping Goat and Other Stories, was published in 1965. She has written more than 135 children and young adult books including Witch's Sister, The Witch Returns, The Bodies in the Bessledorf Hotel, A String of Chances, The Keeper, Walker's Crossing, Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry, Please Do Feed the Bears, and The Agony of Alice, which was the first book in the Alice series. She has received several awards including the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Night Cry and the Newberry Award for Shiloh.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-7-The perennial heroine of five Naylor novels is back in a droll tale of early adolescent pluck, curiosity, and angst. Motherless since early childhood, Alice finds turning 13 a time of awkward transition from girlhood to womanhood, a topic she never hesitates to discuss frankly with her father and older brother, Lester. The highlight of her summer is a visit with best friends Pamela and Elizabeth to her Aunt Sally's home in Chicago. The girls travel without a chaperone, enjoying the sophistication of an overnight train trip in a sleeper car. Pamela is comely and deceptively mature-looking, and when she attracts the persistent attention of an older man, Elizabeth and Alice boldly and humorously stage her rescue. A sober touch is provided when Mrs. Plotkin, Alice's beloved sixth grade teacher and surrogate mother, has a heart attack and is hospitalized. By summer's end, Alice is beginning to feel more in control of her fledgling maturation as she renews her special friendship with old flame Patrick. This is bound to reassure the many adolescent fans who can identify with the ``in-between blues.''-Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Not yet as developed as she would like to be, but certainly no longer a child, Alice is simply, typically -- thirteen. With her friends, she experiences the usual preteen fixations, trials, expectations, and disappointments, which emerge naturally through good plotting and effective dialogue. From HORN BOOK 1994, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The fifth book about Alice slips comfortably into formula, but fans of the motherless preteen (now completing seventh grade) won't object. It's not only Alice who's pausing on the verge of a next phase; her brother Lester, 20, is still happily enamored of the same two young women; and Dad's romance with Alice's teacher is still tempered by his wife's memory. Meanwhile, Alice and friend Pamela test their dawning maturity. Alice dresses up for a 13th birthday-gift evening with Lester, during which they rescue his friend Crystal from an obnoxious pickup; more threateningly, when Alice, Pamela, and their timid friend Elizabeth take a sleeper to visit Aunt Sally, an older man takes Pamela's grownup pose all too seriously. But on the whole Alice is comfortable being neither a child nor an adult; ``I was sort of between problems,'' she observes, and it's a pleasure to visit her in this unwontedly tranquil state. Still, a casual but unexpectedly warm kiss from old friend Patrick at book's end suggests that the new teenager--as thoughtful and lively as ever--will soon be on to the next stage. (Fiction. 10-14)
Booklist Review
Gr. 5-7. Naylor's books about Alice get better and better. This gentle, affectionate comedy dramatizes the uncertainty of being in-between. At 13 Alice feels she's no longer a kid, though she does slip back sometimes and act giggly and gross. She's not yet a young woman, though she does have lots of "intimate conversations" about boys and bodies, and she longs to have real cleavage to fill out her clothes. Her two best friends are like the opposing parts of herself. Pamela is suddenly sexy and flirting with danger. Elizabeth hates any talk of nudity and wedding nights, and she doesn't pass the pencil test when they measure their breasts. Alice is less of a klutz than she used to be in the early books, such as The Agony of Alice (1985), though she's still bewildered about rituals like table manners ("It's what to eat and what to eat it with and how much to eat and what to say and20.20.20."). Her widower dad has become just too sensitive, loving, and wise to be true, but the farce of her older brother, Lester, and his girlfriends continues to provide Alice with entertainment and instruction. His laconic one-liners are perfectly tuned. Alice says by eighth grade she and her friends will all be raving beauties. "Raving, anyway," Lester says. ~--Hazel Rochman
