Intensely Alice (Alice Series)

When the perfect summer is not so perfect...

Wouldn't it be great to go back to the time before Pamela got pregnant, before Patrick left for the University of Chicago, before anyone was making any big decisions about sex or college or life in general? Wouldn't it be great to get the whole gang together again, just once? But what it takes for this to happen will change Alice (and the whole gang) forever.

VOYA

This latest series entry is aptly titled, as Alice and her friends experience intense situations and emotions the summer before their senior year. A beginning jolt shows Alice plotting to have sex with her boyfriend Patrick. Her cousin's wedding allows Alice to see Patrick under the guise of touring his campus, but although a risque bachelorette party sizzles, Patrick fizzles. After a graphic mutual masturbatory scene, they sleep separately. Alice and friends next grapple with religion after meeting Christian fundamentalist Shelley, who vehemently asserts her views are solely correct. Alice, already bewildered by Patrick, adds religious uncertainty to her feelings. After Alice and her girlfriends apartment-sit for her brother and competently handle various difficult problems, their confidence soars. It waivers, however, after their friend Mark is killed in a traffic accident, and they begin experiencing grief, pain, and confusion. Alice again faces religious turmoil, but after time with family, friends, and Mark's parents, she concludes that not having answers to tough questions is natural with living life abundantly. Obvious contrivances propel Alice's situations throughout the story. Religious confusion is a dominant theme, and although Mark's death allows Alice's spiritual growth, it also neatly reunites the series' past and present characters and tidies the plot. Patrick's declining sex with a willing Alice and his virtual disappearance from the story should cause reader skepticism; this theme definitely needed continuation. Regardless female series fans will gobble this enjoyable read. Reviewer: Lisa A Hazlett

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 thirty-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. Visit Phyllis online at alicemckinley.wordpress.com