the agony of alice by phyllis reynolds naylor

She asked Lester about it once, but he told her that a period is something “looks like a comma without the tail and goes at the end of a sentence.” Alice worries that she will never learn how to be a teenage girl.

Although her father and brother are loving, caring, and open to discussing almost everything Alice brings up, Alice wants a female role model and guide-someone to sew her Halloween costumes and to explain menstruation. At the same time, now that she is almost a teenager, she has really started to feel the absence of her mother. She is particularly mortified to recall such misadventures as roping her next-door neighbor, Donald Sheavers, into reenacting a kissing scene from a movie and being caught by the milkman (a minor character who is updated into a mailman in later editions).Īlice is excited to finally start middle school with her friend Elizabeth and her sometimes friend-but sometimes rival-Pamela. Even though it’s not a big move, Alice is happy to leave behind the embarrassments of her old neighborhood. When the novel opens, the McKinleys are in the process of moving from Tacoma Park to Silver Spring, the next town over. Her father runs a music shop that sells jokey paraphernalia like notepads that read “Chopin Liszt” instead of “Shopping List,” while her cool, slobby 19-year-old brother is already in junior college, beset by a variety of girlfriends. When she was five, her mother died of leukemia, leaving behind Alice and her older brother, Lester, to be raised by their father. Twelve-year-old Alice McKinley has spent her life so far in Tacoma Park, Maryland.

Because Naylor doesn’t shy away from topics like sexuality and the normal development of the human body, the series has often ended up on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books. What emerges is a sympathetic and insightful look at the inner life of a preteen, teen, and adult that eschews melodrama and plot twists in favor of a matter-of-fact discussion of more universal rites of passage. The novels are episodic, focusing on moments of embarrassment and epiphany. To make sure that her novels were grounded in realism, Naylor used details from her own adolescence and remembered incidents from the lives of her friends and even her mother.

Over the course of more than 25 novels, the series follows Alice from sixth grade through her 20s, chronicling the trials and tribulations faced by this likable and relatable young woman. The Agony of Alice (1987) is the first of the beloved children’s and young adult Alice book series by author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

The agony of alice by phyllis reynolds naylor