Susan Juby - Böcker

The hilarious diary of Alice and her attempts to survive the embarrassments that are her parents, the small-minded nature of her hometown, and her own struggle to fit in. Highly observant, satirical and wise.Fifteen years old and nursing a "serious case of outcastitis," Alice MacLeod is having a hard time finding anything much to like in small town Smithers, British Columbia. Her mum's a folk-festival hippie chick with a hair-trigger temper, her dad's a mild and reasonable sort of loser who hides out in the basement trying to write soft-core romance novels, and her last school counsellor threw a teary fit in the middle of a session and left the profession entirely. She'd love to "get past what my father calls my 'knee-jerk dislike of just about anything,'" but she's not sure that there's anything out there that's worth it.Alice's journal is filled with eye-rolling protests at the embarrassments and stupidities she finds herself surrounded with: her mother's drumming-circle friends, the therapeutic jargon thrown her way by counsellors and the outstanding inefficacity of her current counsellor, Death Lord Bob. But Alice's sharp bark doesn't do much to conceal her lack of a bite. It's her mum, after all, not Alice, who gets into a fistfight with Linda, the town's teen thug, while Alice sits cringing in the family car. In fact, Alice has a sweet side, which she makes all the more endearing by getting all squirmy and ashamed whenever she reveals it. Alice's fierce ungainliness, and her unwillingness to surrender it to make her life any easier, make her struggles highly appealing.

From the author of the hilarious I’m Alice (I think), comes the irresistibly funny sequel, with further adventures of Alice’s adolescent angst.Sixteen-year old Alice suspects that this is the year she’s going to bloom, graduating from the ranks of the marginal into the realm of the practically normal. That’s immediately confirmed when, lured by the $400 clothing allowance, she becomes the official Rod & Gun Club candidate in the town’s Miss Smithers, BC, Beauty Pageant.Now that she’s practically normal, Alice is anxious to try new things. But she can’t decide whether to push her sort-of boyfriend, Goose, into having sex with her, or to take a vow of chastity with the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) movement.Alice, fresh from her hit debut in I’m Alice, I Think – and complete with satirical wit and unique thrift-shop style – is back in this uniquely funny take on surviving the tough teen years.