It was ok. Read it in HS and thought it was great. Re-reading it about 35 years later, I had a different perspective No teenage girl would write like this, especially one on drugs. And if she was that high, she probably wouldn’t remember what happened, let alone writing about the events in her diary. This book was clearly contrived and not a real diary. ( )

I read Go Ask Alice for the first time yesterday and had what was for me a profound reaction. I was shaken, I was stunned, I was moved in a way that few books have moved me. I believed the story completely, though the unnamed main character seemed surprisingly literate, intelligent, and self-aware. Perhaps not the typical American or West Coast fifteen year old girl, but, hey, Anne Frank was several cuts above typical too. Maybe "Alice" was special. I liked her, she had zest in her hopes and reactions to the wide emotional swings teenagers have. She was perhaps a kind of teen-age Madame Bovary, whose lust for life tragically spilled over into uncontrollable excess.

Fast forward twenty-four hours and now I find out the whole thing may well be a hoax. The Anne Frank / Bovary qualities I admired now appear to reflect no more than faulty execution by the Mormon social worker who penned it anonymously but then sometime later decided to come forward to collect fame and royalties. Ouch.

First reaction: What a fool I am to have been so totally taken in! And what an out-of-it fool never to have read the book before or registered the chatter about its authenticity. What kind of head-in-the-sand clown am I? (Maybe that's all a little harsh).

But wait. To be honest, Go Ask Alice continues to have deep effect on me. I'm still shaking from it. What's with that, I wonder.

Then I notice that this book has been reviewed over 11,500 times on Goodreads, and many if not most of the reviews seem to dismiss it totally as hoax and/or propaganda. But then I check out where the book ends up on the lists: #9 on Best Teen Books on Real Problems, #86 on Best Young Adult Books. Is the better performance on lists because anti-drug propagandists somehow prefer list voting to review writing? Could there be something therapeutic or even curative in this book that review writers are loath to come out and admit?

For me there's a great deal in it that's worth my while. It's about important stuff. It's about how, for adolescents who are passionate about life, the pieces don't fit. It's about how their peers are as confused as they are and how the grown-ups are witless and clueless, having apparently mostly forgotten what it was like being young, passionate, vulnerable, and transitional, instead regarding it all as a "normal" rite of passage. And yet the pain of this normalcy can be so intense, too intense for us adults to condone having largely damped or mislaid it. For me, "Alice's" intense pain was real, even if she wasn't.

Adolescence is a life or death matter, I conclude, and all adolescents die, perhaps not literally but surely in terms of the painful changes they go through and the hopes, ideals, and personae that are lost and betrayed. We could say they die sacrificially so the grown-up world they eventually join can go on with its deadly norms and, as we see today, more stupid wars.

At the risk of ranting like a graybeard Holden Caulfield, my takeaway is that adolescence is indeed sacrificial, that it has tragic elements, that the pain is real, searing and sometimes appalling; and that the sacrifices are not recognized as they should be. Maybe it's my own pained adolescence crying out to me right now; if so, I'll memorialize that too.

So, hoax or no, five stars for the hurt it delivered that I needed to relive. ( )

This book has been on my TBR forever, and before I completely swore off YA, I thought I should get it in. Also, I needed a 50th book to finish my mediocre reading year, and this one was short.

I imagine that when people thought this was a real diary from a real teenager, this book would have been a wow. Unfortunately, the actual author is now known which detracts from it in the same way [b:A Million Little Pieces|1241|A Million Little Pieces|James Frey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483206985l/1241._SY75_.jpg|3140930] seemed amazing until it turned out to be fiction.

The story follows a 15 year old teenager who gets hooked on drugs. In the 70's this concept was probably fresher and more easily believed. Now that most of our generation has actually tried drugs, the descriptions of drug use seem a little far fetched. Also, the teen's parents seem pretty wonderful, forgiving, and supportive in every way. I don't want to spoil the book, but at least two of the incidents of drug use seemed quite out of the protagonist's hands and yet had serious repercussions.

At any rate, I liked the fact that the author didn't shy away from the dark side in the least, and I thought the protagonist truly seemed to think like a teenager might. It had its moments of surprise. I think I would have thought this book was terrific and edgy as a young teen. Sadly I didn't read it then. ( )

Publicado por primera vez con gran éxito en 1973, es el diario real de una adolescente de 15 años que se introduce en el mundo de las drogas. Sin culpables ni moralinas hipócritas, nos narra el abismo de degradación al que llega la protagonista. Una historia auténtica y conmovedora, que sigue siendo actual.

I cannot believe my 8th grade English teacher said this was a good book for understanding addiction . ( )