ALICE MACLEOD, REALIST AT LAST

Sixteen-year-old Alice MacLeod of Smithers, B.C., finds herself at the beginning of the summer virtually cast adrift: Her therapist is in Vancouver, her best friend is in Wisconsin, her boyfriend is in Scotland and her environmental protester-mother is in jail. It’s up to Alice to get a job to contribute to the family fortunes in her mother’s absence, her hippie father never having actually been successfully employed. Nobody is more surprised than Alice when she finds herself with not one but two part-time jobs and not one but three male admirers. Alice’s self-absorbed narration, true to the title, betrays more and more understanding of objective reality, and some of the funniest moments are her clearest, as when she fends off the enthusiasms of her classmates at a pre-Grade 12 party, the upcoming camaraderie of the last year of school having wiped out the differences of the previous 11. Lest Alice’s fans be worried that she is too much the realist, take heart: The screenplay of Of Moose and Men occupies the interstices of the tale, as Alice reinterprets each failure as an unqualified success. Thank goodness she’s back. (Fiction. YA)