More Alice

It's the summer of the first boyfriend.

Alice in Rapture, Sort of

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

[#18 in my 52 Book Challenge]

#2 in the Alice series

“The scary part about having a boyfriend, I guess, is that you’re never sure what will happen next. In some ways, that’s the nice part. You always wonder. With me, though, I worried more than I wondered. The closer you get to someone, the closer you want to be. How close is too close? How close isn’t close enough?”

If one were to read this book by itself, it might be a pretty dull book. Not a lot happens. Alice and her two BFF’s, Pamela and Elizabeth, spend most of the book walking around their neighborhood with their boyfriends during summer vacation. Occassionally Alice gets humiliated/sick/calls her aunt for advice, but mostly it’s just a book about experiencing middle school love for the first time.

That being said, it’s also realistic. Alice is a pretty typical, suburban kid. She’s awkward and she worries a lot, but she also has a kindness and a confidence that even she doesn’t realize. Within the series as a whole it is a very important book — it is the beginning of Alice and Patrick’s love.

(if you don’t like spoilers, don’t continue reading!)

I have read most of the Alice books, so I know where the storyline is going. I know where the Alice/Patrick thing goes. That being said, it was hard to miss the passage in the book where Alice and Patrick make a promise to each other that, no matter what happens, he will call her and ask her on a date on New Year’s Eve when they are 21. Naylor must have known when she wrote the book what her plans are for Alice and how she was going to shape the series. Now I’m curious to see if such a phone call takes place.

Alice in Rapture, Sort of is definitely an interesting read after having read others in the series because it does start setting the stage for so much of what happens in Alice’s story. I’m excited to continue reading, in order.

“I realized I was spending an awful lot of my life worrying about what Patrick thought. What Patrick thought of my breath, my teeth, my hair, my feet, my knees, my manners…I really liked him — more, probably, than he guessed — but it was time to start liking myself, too. What did I think? What kind of a person did I want to be? Something was missing here, and the something was me.”

About these ads