"Alice in Charge" by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

321 pages

This is the most recent in the popular Alice series, which Naylor started writing in 1985. Now Alice is a senior in high school and missing her boyfriend, Patrick, who is at college in Chicago (she lives in Maryland). It helps that she keeps herself busy with the school paper, student jury, various other clubs, and working at her father's music store. On top of it all, she's trying to figure out where to go to college. She wants to get away and try a new place, but she also feels like she should stick close to home to be there for her dad and stepmother, as they are going through a hard time financially. Meanwhile, a neo-Nazi group is slowly emerging at Alice's school and she wants to use her position as the features editor of the school paper to do something about it.

I have enjoyed all the Alice books that I've read, but I like the earlier ones better. Naylor seems to write perfectly for tween and early teen readers, but her style didn't seem to translate as well to books for older readers. When Alice and her friends are younger, they think and act much like I did at that age, but I didn't find Alice and her friends as believable as seniors in high school. On the other hand, I think the secondary characters such as Lester and Sylvia are just as charming at this later point in the series. And I did enjoy the story as a whole. It seemed sort of all-over-the-place, but that's sort of how life is when you're a teenager, so it didn't bother me so much. The racism issue seemed a bit overdramatic (for example, I can't believe that in the year 2010 a kid at a large urban school would write a racist letter to the editor of his school paper, signed with his real name). I know that prejudice and bigotry are definitely real and still going strong today, but I think that in reality the Nazi group would have been more subtle and "underground." I do like that Naylor tackles a lot of tough issues in her books, though.