Go Ask Alice

Not What I Hoped For

WARNING: Avoid this book if you have triggers relating to self-harm. It's treated like a hobby at times and completely sensationalized at others, resulting in a completely insensitive inclusion. Ditto to suicidal thoughts.

Still here? Okay, then brace yourself for some discussions involving the above-mentioned elements as I get into the gist of this book...

Two sixteen-year-old girls play a dumb roleplaying game where they take random drugs to enhance the experience. They just plan to get high on the unknown substances purchased from a classmate, not kill themselves - though they've apparently done such idiotic things in the past as cutting their wrists together just to be edgy. Alice ends up taking some downers and passing out. Her girlfriend, Cat, takes basically everything that's left and drops dead. Afterward, everyone blames Alice even though she also did drugs and it's pretty clearly a stupid mistake they made together, not a murder. She tells people that they had planned to just get high, and they immediately scream at her as if they think she's “playing games” and act as if she's a murderer - even her own mom and stepfather, neither of whom seem to give half a care that her girlfriend is now dead and she needs emotional support.

On top of this, the girls are vampire-obsessed “drama llamas” (the term is used, completely out of proper context, in the book) who are basically the stereotypical goths plucked from every fanfiction made in the early 2000s - just less heteronormative. Oh, and the narrating voice is so informal that it almost sounds completely detached at times. The narrator spends more time grousing about how she supposedly feels than actually believably portraying any of those feelings. It's all quite juvenile and amateurish, in my opinion.

All of this comes from the first chapter. I'm not even kidding. It gets worse in further chapters, but it's all there from the very beginning. Looming. Threatening of unenjoyable reading ahead. Obviously, I didn't heed the warning signs, because here I am reviewing the book.

I'm not even sure how to properly describe the experience of reading this. It's very clearly derivative of the classic Alice tale, but I think that's precisely the point so I can't fault it for that. The writing style is so informal, it feels like reading an old livejournal or something, and while that seems to fit the narrating character's personality it's just too much to handle. (Example passage: There are mirrors stacked everywhere. I mean, for real. They???re just everywhere.) However, this book is a very quick read, so I was able to convince myself to keep going each time I thought I'd had enough of the writing style.

The story told is... a confusing acid trip, not unlike the journey taken by the classic Alice. It twists and turns and just when you think you know what's happening you find out maybe you know nothing at all. I can't decide if that's good or bad. I had hoped for a coherent, semi-believable plot about a girl caught up in a terrible drug-related mystery about her girlfriend's death, but I got no such thing. If you want to be led on a crazy journey through surrealism, though, I'm sure it'd be more enjoyable and less frustrating than it was for me. That's where I'm torn. A very specific set of readers would love this, but reviews are about individual opinions and I just didn't care for the book. And the ending was just plain bad - one of the most annoying tropes, in fact.

If there weren't so many characters who feel tokenized and the writing style didn't make me want to grab Alice and shake her for being so annoying, I think I'd be more lenient with my rating. But holy smokes, is there ever some insensitive stuff in this book! I've already mentioned the gross mishandling of self harm in enough detail, but it doesn't stop there. A trans girl's identity is sensationalized to the point it's used as her primary identifier rather than just part of who she is. At another point, a character is introduced using skin colour as a main identifier and she turns out to be a complete stereotype from the way she dresses to the way she speaks. These things just plain feel icky, and I don't like them.

Overall, I wish I hadn't bothered with this book. It was nothing like I'd hoped and the ending ruined any hope I'd had for a deep and intriguing means of piecing together the nonsense. The two stars are a generosity, and only awarded because I think most of my issues with it are matters of personal taste and inaccurate expectations. Otherwise, this would be a one-star-at-most book for me.