The Truth About Alice (YA)

Book #66 Read in 2014
The Truth About Alice by Jennifer Mathieu (YA)

This was a great, gritty, realistic young adult read.  Alice supposedly sleeps with two guys in the same night.  The talk about it spreads through the little Texan town and Alice becomes the high school pariah.  Girls in her class start the "slut stall" where they write tales about what Alice has supposedly done...she's had an abortion, she has slept with this one and that one.  On top of that, shortly after the party the star quarterback (and one of the two guys that Alice supposedly slept with) dies in a car accident and his friend who was in the car with him tells adults that the quarterback was distracted because Alice was constantly texting him.  Alice retreats within herself and isolates herself from her peers.  The geek of the class, Kurt, reaches out to her to help her with her Math homework.  But will it make a difference?

This book shows how cruel teenagers can be to each other and how vicious gossip and rumors can be and what effect they can have on people's lives.  Alice, while not a perfect character by any means, was treated cruelly.  An all too true and all too sad accounting of what can happen when people believe whatever they hear, this was a book I could not put down.

I borrowed this book from my public library.