Dangerously Alice

Alice has always tried to be a decent person. She gets good grades, comes home on time, and has never really given her dad and her stepmom any reason to worry. But now that junior year of high school has started, Alice is a little sick of people assuming she's a goody-goody, so she decides to start shaking things up. First there are the dates with Tony, a cute senior who's a lot more experienced than Alice. Then the fights with her stepmom about the new cat, the car, and everything else start. But when Alice sneaks off to a party that her parents don't know about and a near-tragedy follows, she starts to realize every choice has a consequence, and danger rarely leads to good ones.

Funny, realistic, and always provocative, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor does it again, proving that she understands what real girls think and feel, with this twenty-second book in the beloved Alice series.

Children's Literature

Alice doesn't like being called Miss Goody Two-shoes—MGT for short—by the girls at school and so she strikes out to do some things that she knows not everyone would approve of, like dating high school senior, Tony, who is definitely more interested in Alice's body than her mind. At the same time that she's navigating her nascent sexuality, she's in the throes of an unrequited crush on the editor of the school newspaper, is having running battles with her former teacher, her stepmother, Sylvia, is negotiating driving privileges with her dad, and now she is trying to keep up the spirits of her friend Molly, who is being treated for leukemia. Although all comes out right in the end, Alice definitely gives her parents some painfully worried hours when she goes to a party without phoning and ends up at the police station. Alice's strong sense of values and family ties sustain her eventually, but it is enough to remind you why you wouldn't want to be a teenager again. This is the latest in a very popular series and so won't require much enticement of already converted fans; however, recommenders should take into account the fairly explicit descriptions of sexual foreplay in this book.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor includes many of her own growing-up experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults and is the author of more than one hundred and twenty-five books, including the Alice series, which Entertainment Weekly has called "tender" and "wonderful." In 1992 her novel Shiloh won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two sons, both grown and married.