Go Ask Alice Analysis

Stars, They're Just Like Us!The setting of Alice's diary is purposefully vague. The authors practically bend over backward trying to make Alice relatable to every teen that might get their hands on...

Our story is told, by necessity, in the first person. Otherwise it'd be a pretty weird diary. Plus, this up-close-and-personal dynamic is great for those times when Alice's interior monologue is co...

This book most definitely falls in the genre of "coming of age"—it has all the hallmarks of adolescent conflict: insecurity, social cliques, dating, the lure of illicit behavior, the quest to def...

Gee, those adjectives make this book sound like a load of fun, don't they? But Alice is a histrionic kind of gal. Every entry she writes includes some form of dramatic exclamation about how she'll...

Informal, Conversational, You Get the IdeaWhen writing in a diary, it's not like you're paying super-close attention to grammar or sentence structure. You're just trying to get an idea down on the...

Go Ask Alice is a reference to a Jefferson Airplane song called "White Rabbit," which alludes to rampant hallucinogenic drug use in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Did we lose you? Okay,...

Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user. It is not a definitive statement on the middle-class, teenage drug world. It does not offer any solutions. It is, however,...

The epilogue, like the epigraph, serves to really hammer home the "hidden moral" of the story, which is basically drugs are the most terrible things ever.By ending the diary with an editor's note a...

Let's face it: The language itself isn't very difficult to understand. This book was written like a diary of a teenage girl from the late 1960s/early 70s, so it has some now-obscure slang—but oth...

Look At Me—I'm So Much Like YouThe beginning of the diary introduces us to Alice, a strikingly familiar Everygirl. She has all the typical concerns of a young teenager: friends, boyfriends, fitti...

Beatrice Sparks isn't just a charlatan, she's a prolific charlatan. (Source.) It's more like Don't Ask Alice—this book was one of the most frequently challenged (read: people tried to get it bann...

When a diary entry begins with "another day, another blowjob" (165), we know we've got ourselves a pretty steamy read. The sex in this book isn't all that explicit—there aren't romance-novel-leve...

Lewis G. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (47.1)Jules Verne (57.2)"She's Leaving Home," the Beatles (111.1)