What intrigued me so much about the book Go Ask Alice, is that it was written by Anonymous. Normally authors are proud to stamp their name in bold print on their book covers, so seeing that this book was written by someone who preferred to be anonymous was immediately eye catching. I figured secrets were scrawled all through this book, like experiences that were true with each and every word, and therefore remaining anonymous was necessary.
In a way, this is true, and false. The author of this book really had no say on whether their name was added or not, because Go Ask Alice is teenager’s diary that was put into print, after she had passed away.
Now immediately you know that the author of this book is dead, because the back cover of the book contains a short intro which tells you that ultimately her drug use leads her to her death.
All names, places and other details are changed to protect the authors identity, and those people in her diary she mentions.
Go Ask Alice starts off like any typical teen diary. A young girl yearns for a friend, she is lonely, bored, and has extreme mood shifts with nearly every other passage. She goes from extreme levels of happy, and extreme levels of sad. Looking into any teens diary, this sort of shifting is completely normal.
When she is uprooted from her home and moves to another place, she immediately does not fit in, but she makes friends with a girl who lives next to her. They make a perfect friendship, and are basically inseparable.
When summer rolls around though, her friend is forced to go away to summer camp, leaving behind our anonymous author.
With her friend gone, she decides to spend the summer back home with her grandparents. While home, she falls into the wrong crowd, and is invited to a party where LSD is slipped into her drink. This is basically her introduction to the drug scene.
She enjoyed the LSD trip and begins to take more and more different drugs to see what kind of high she can achieve from them.
The diary spirals from there into a downward tunnel of drugs, sexual abuse, and running into more and more druggie crowds. She runs away a few times, only to return back home, where she consistently tells herself she is done with drugs.
Towards the very end of the book, you wonder how she is going to die because she seems to be really sticking to her word. With each entry she goes on about how she has not touched drugs in so long, how she never wants to touch them again, and how she is staying clean.
Then the book ends with one huge shock. Just when you think she is doing good, a quick short paragraph about how the author was found dead 2 weeks later is added.
Its an added unexpected ending you knew was coming, but you were not expecting to happen the way it did.
Overall Go Ask Alice is a really fantastic book/diary, with a huge unexpected ending. Its a book I recommend to parents, and teens alike. It’s a look into a real girls life, that came to a real tragic ending due to drugs.
