Bookreport

Fach: English

on 21^st of April,2000

Go Ask Alice is a story about a drugaddict teenager and her attemts to escape from them.

GO ASK ALICE (summary)

Alice started writing her diary shortly before her 15^th birthday, because her boyfriend broke up with her and she felt really down, unpopular, ugly and missunderstood by everybody even by her parents. She decided to change and started to exercise every morning and eat healthy. Later on, her dad had been invited to become the Dean of Political Science in another city and the whole family had to move there. Alice was very scared of her new life in a new city, she was wondering how she was going to make it up in a new school with new kids. Finally the first schoolday arrived and it was like she had it always expected. Nobody talked to her during the whole endlessly long day and during the lunch period she fled to the nurse`s office and said she had a headache just to stay away from the crowd of kids. Time went by and she kept being alone without friends she didn`t bother about her look anylonger and felt rotten.One day she met a girl on her way from school, who was really good looking but very shy. The two girls became best friends, they shared everything together, problems, joy and all the stuff girls talk about when they are alone. In the summer holidays Alice visited her grandparents, she had a very good releationship with them, even better than with her parents. She was delightfully surprised as Jill, who never talked to her before or even knew that she existed, invited Alice to a Party at her place. Alice was so happy she could cry the party was great everybody seemed to be really nice and friendly. Jill winked at Alice and told her that they were going to play a game called "Button! Button! Who has the Button?" Alice didn´t know what that means but she was afraid to expose herself if she would ask. All the kids got a bottle of coke and they had to drink it, so did Alice but suddenly she began to feel something strange inside herself it felt like a storm. The only thing she could remember was that first she thought the kids at the party wanted to poison her, but then she remembered Bill Thomson saying: " enjoy your trip, I`ll take care of you." For the first time in her life she felt completely uninhibitited, when she began to come down she was told that 10 of the 14 bottles of coke contained LSD. From now on she began to date Bill and take drugs regularly, because she was curious at the effect of different drugs. After Gramps had had a heart attack Alice began to cool down, she stayed at home helping with the cooking and so on. She decided to trip a last time before going home and never try drugs again, so she went to Bill`s place where already were other kids and took one last trip on acid, well the trace of it was, she lost her virginity. One day before going home she met Roger, her first and only true love, again, with whom she built up a friendship even through she lived in an other city. Back home she took Dexies to to stay high at school and at work and on dates, then she had to take tranquilizers to bear up at home. She met Chris and the two became best friends they had even taken the same job and she first tried pot with her. The two met Ted and Richi who were already in college, they got stoned tougether nerly every night and Alice fell in love with Rich she even sold drugs to junior high school kids for him. As Alice realized that she wasn`t the one and only girl in his life she stopped selling and turned Richi to the police. They decided it would be impossible to change while they were in this city so they went to cut out and go to San Francisco. After hard work of searching for a job both of them found a job in shops.The owners of the shops were very understanding and nice. Shelia the boss of Chris invited them to a party, Alice couldn`t resist and took drugs again but this time she tried heroin and as a result she got raped without knowing it . She and Chris quit their jobs and found a new appartment which they designed inside by themselves and a lot of kids visited them regularly, but by the time Alice got homesick and called her parents to pick her up and returned back home, everything seemed to be great a happy new year party, a lot of fun and a loving family. All the problems started when Alice has to go to school again, she was pulled down by the teachers and kids no one believed she was clean so she got one more time by group pressure into drugtaking. After the police raided Chris`s house, Alice`s parents became worried they started to babysit Alice as if she was a small child they even didn`t let her go to the bathroom alone. The Pressure at home was so big that she couldn`t stand it any longer and fled to Oregon with some other kids who were also drug addicted. In Coos Bay she met Doris, a 14 year old girl who was raped by her stepfather and her brothers, she seemed to know everybody here, she turned Alice to baby prostitution, by the time she got more turned on girls then on boys. After she had discussed the Problems with some kids who were stoned she went to a church and talked to a priest who called her parents and Alice decided to return home and wante to start work as a social worker to help drug addicted kids to solve their problems without drug taking.She promised to her self to stay off drugs. From this moment on she had a very hard life, ther were two groups of kids at her school one of them were the kids who never took drugs and hadn`t even thought of it and the other one was the doper gang who started to manipulate Alice.Alice began to study a lot just to stay at home and prove that she can manage it to be good at school again and also to prove herself that she can mange without drugs. She started to go the university library where she met Joel. They met every day at the library and got very familiar to eachother but Alice didn`t tell him the whole truth about her former life. A big effect on her further life and her mental constitution had the death first of her grandpa and then of her grandma. She couldn`t put up with the situation and suffered from the thought how the dead bodies of her loving grandparents were eaten by the worms. She was also blamed by the drug gang that the police raided their last party, and arrested some of them. From now on she her life turned into a nightmare. The kids swore to avenge themselves on her , she was pursued by them offended and abused. Nobody talked to her anymore and by the time the drug gang seemded to loose interest on her. In the holidays she started to babysit at a friend`s house but something had happened, she didn`t know what she only knew that she woke up in a hospital and a lot of worms crawled on her body, her hands had combustions and she had bleak places on her head. She could remember eating some peanuts then she felt sick an saw her grandfather in all colours. He tried to help her but his body was eaten by worms wich crowled over on her. After a two weeks Alice was released from the hospital she got a new hair cut to hide her bleak places on her head and the doctor said that her hands will get totally ok doubtlessly in a year. But that wasn`t the end of the bad dream, some kids from the drug gang had turned her to the police for selling drugs to them and she was sent to an insane asylum. It was the worst thing in her life, she had to accept that she had a problem to go to school. She talked to the kids there about their problems and why they got there. She found a friend with whom she spent most of her time. Finally her parents get her out of that hole by resud the gang to signe Alice had never sold drugs to them. At her birthday she was surprised by Joel, she was really in love with him. She decided she was now old enough to discuss her problems with human beings and didn`t need to keep a diary any longer. Three weeks after her decision not to keep a diary, Alice died of an overdose.

Alice is a typical teenager going through her teenager years, all teenagers have the same problems it only depends on the parents and on the children themselves how they are going to manage their problems. It is easier for people who are selfconfident than for kids who are afraid of telling their problems and talking to other people. Alice is a kid who suffers from her loneliness and taciturnness. Sometimes she sees her problems but she doesn`t want to change or she wants to change but she can`t because she is not selfconfident enough to look in the mirror and say: "That`s me! I´m as I´m and the others have to accept me like that!" The only way make her to feel good is to take drugs.She escapes from her world into an other dimension which makes her forget her problems and makes her feel free, only there she can behave as she wants to. If you read her diary you can see how she feels only by reading the words she uses. While she was in Oregon her Language became very rough, and she uses words which are mostly used only on the street. She had accepted that she has a problem and she would wish to live a life like other kids but she is not strong enough to keep off drugs so she needs several tries before she finally kept off drug taking, but the drug gang got afraid that she could go to the police or they were just jealous that she could resist the temptation. So they tried to get her off their way or turn her in again. Alice is a very naive person, she needs somebody who can listen to her and share his problems with her, because Alice is a very understanding person but she got used several times so she needs a friend who would never try to use her for his own advantages. Such people are hard to find but in the end she found some one whom she could trust but it was already to late for her. The mistake her parents made was that they hadn`t seen her problem as something important they thought she could manage it on her own so they didn`t try hard to help her or to talk to her. When they firs reallized that she had big problems with the students in her school they should have let her live with her grandparents or move to an other city where she could visit another school and build up a new reputation, they missed this chynce and their daughter.

The problems of the kids with whom Alice has spoken seem to be the same. Most of them ran away from home because they had troubles with their parents, were raped or just because their parents naged them, the most reason was that the parents wanted  them to do things the didn´t want, because of such small misunderstanding they ruined their lives.