Shortcomings

I feel the shortcomings of this book is the dialect of which it is written. The dialect leads to me to have minor doubt in the truth of the story. If you were to read an average teenage girl's diary you would find opinions on school, boys, other girls, etc... During this book her diary entries are freakishly on topic the whole time. The book, rarely goes off on a discussion outside of drugs. How can it be possible that a teenage girl doesn't have a crush or hates homework. It maybe that other topics were eliminated during the publication process.  However, I feel that had there been dialect relevant to her thoughts on things other than drugs it would be more true to life.

Praiseworthy

There is a couple of things that I find praiseworthy about this book.  One of which is the strength of the family that aloud for her story to be told to the world.  Second the books ability to demonstrate that in life we have decisions to make and when making decisions you have to think about others and the possibilities of danger. The strength that it takes to allow for millions of people to read about their daughter's death is above anything of a common family would ever have to experience and is truly praise worthy. The book also shows you about the weight of each decision you make. That brought attention to me because it opened my eyes to how I should think and judge my decisions before I choose to do something.

Main Idea

Theme of this book is the effects drugs can have on a person. The book indicates this theme  very early with the opening passage , that was a message from the publisher, thanking the family for allowing them to use her diary, so that no family would ever have to go through, the lost of someone due to drugs. Then is further expressed with the story of her life during the time she was using. Such as, she talks about how her thought process was, which was when can I get high, on what, and how soon. Then when she got her "fix" for a lack of a better term, she just wanted to know when she could get this feeling again.

Mood

The mood that is expressed throughout this book is sadness and despair. At times there was extreme happiness and joy. The presumption that "Alice" dies in the end prevents  you from achieving a positive feeling. However, knowing the ending defiantly provides a distinctive mood, which was sad. "Hell' I'm shaking on the inside more than I am on the outside. What a bastard life it is with out drugs." As she fell into the dark hole that drugs can put you in, you could feel the regret in every decision that she made. When she chose to use acid for the second time, she expresses, how it mad her feel like a low life, who was going to be living on the street when she gets older. She stated; "For the last two days I've been trying to convince myself that using LSD makes me a "dope addict" and all other kinds of low-life, unclean people".

Element

The mot important element that moved me the most were the events. The events in this book weren't just casual events that happened.  It was a moving event each time that kept you wanting too know what she did next and the knowledge of  how she turned out. Each event brought a strong message with that created emotions of fear, sadness and hope.  Events like her running away and upon her return her family rushed too her with open arms and had no resentment for her decisions. That moved me, in fact I hate to admit it, but it broke me down.

Type of person

Based on my reading of this book, my opinion of the type of person "Alice" was a nice, caring, intelligent, young women  who fell into the wrong crowd because she had a good time at a party when someone slipped her some acid without her knowing. I can tell the she cares about people because when she runs away for the first time, the girl she left with is struggling to get by, and she uses the money that she was saving to help her out. She volunteered her time to help her grandmother after she moved into her family home.  Her grandmother was ill and she wanted to help her along with it providing a distraction from her thoughts of continuing to use drugs.

Author's Purpose

There is one main purpose to Go Ask Alice, and that is to inform. The Author is a teenager who was trapped in the drug world.  The story  is now used to inform teenagers/people about the dangers of drugs  and how they can take over your body and mind. It was not the original purpose of the book, because obviously it was her diary and she did not plan on a publication that would become  an example of true life examples of what can happen with the use of drugs.  In the Epilogue it states: Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows and in some ways that question isn't important.  What be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.