By Jennifer, Everett Public Library staff
Sometimes (okay, all the time) when I’m readying books for the public to check out, I go all Liam Neeson in Taken:
I don’t know when I’m going to read you or how you’ll make me feel but I can tell you I have a particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long life as a reader. Skills that make me a nightmare to play against in the literary portion of Jeopardy. I will look for you, I will find you, and I will read you.
Lil bit hardcore but books are my passion. I’ll read just about anything. Except computer books. Bless the people who can understand those because when I flip through a computer book all I hear in my head is a bunch of underwater bleeps and bloops.
That being said, I’ve found myself gravitating towards kid books lately. You might already know I have a slightly embarrassing love of YA novels (still couldn’t pay me enough to ever be a teenager again though) so it makes sense that my eyes landed on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s book series about a young girl named Alice. I’m opening up myself to a long commitment because these books span Alice’s life from an 8-year-old all the way through high school. But I don’t think of it as a commitment. It’s meeting a new friend and becoming comfortable enough to steal food from their refrigerator.
The first book in the series is Starting with Alice. Alice McKinley is a lot like other 8-year-old girls. She wants pierced ears, gloriously long hair, a pet, and she wants a mother. Hers died a few years ago and it’s been her, her brother Lester, and their father ever since. What Alice would REALLY like is some friends. Her family moves to Maryland and she doesn’t know a soul except for her neighbor Donald and she’s having a hard time figuring out if he’s really smart or so smart he’s stupid: he’s the kind of boy who asks you if you can lick your elbow.
Starting third grade at a new school isn’t as easy as Alice thinks. She sees a trio of girls she names ‘The Terrible Triplets’ after they go all Mean Girls on her and don’t bother to get to know her. Lonely, facing the world as an 8-year-old without her mother, and living with two males, Alice begins to think she’ll never make friends and never quite get it right. But friends pop up when Alice least expects them, along with weird adventures, a lost cat, and her brother’s awful basement band.
Fans of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series will dive into the Alice saga and surface wanting to find their own Alice to be best friends with.
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