ALICE, I THINK

Comedy rules in Juby’s satirical, laugh-out-loud debut about a wacky home-schooled teenager who decides to try public high school. When Alice was an imaginative little girl enamored of The Hobbit, her well-meaning but inept New Age parents allowed her to start school dressed in full Hobbit regalia, complete with a peaked green cap. Hostile rejection ensued, followed by years of incompetent home-schooling and fruitless therapy. Narrating in a diary format, the now 15-year-old Alice relates her sidesplitting struggles with her clueless parents, social acquaintances, and the various members of the helping professions. Juby wields a sharp pen and has a marvelous time skewering everything from makeup to multiple chemical sensitivity disorder. Although brimming with well-observed quirky characters and waspishly witty narration, some of the incidents are comic riffs only marginally connected to the story line. But the biggest complaint readers will likely have is the pain in their stomachs from laughing. Hilarious. (Fiction. 12-14)