Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks

Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 work credited to Beatrice Sparks who claimed that the book was the true diary of one of her troubled, drug-addicted female patients. In the first pages of the book the protagonist, who is never named, is presented as a typical teenager, concerned with her appearance, school, and boys. Soon, though, the girl is introduced to LSD at a party and her journey into the drug world begins. Both sober and straight episodes for the girl follow and the reader is taken along for the wild ride that her life becomes. The story culminates in the girl getting off the drug roller coaster only to overdose and die three weeks after writing her final diary entry.

Go Ask Alice was one of my favorite books as both a preteen and as a teenager and continues to be one of my favorite stories to this day. Although I realize that the book was probably not the diary of one of Beatrice Sparks’ patients but the work of Beatrice Sparks, herself, Go Ask Alice is still a story that sucks you in and makes you hold your breath until it is done. The logic of two sixteen year old girls opening their own store or the rationality of the main character holding on to scraps of paper and keeping her diary intact during her cross country trials seem irrelevant while you read it and become caught up in the train wreck that is the protagonist’s life.

A Child Called It by David Pelzer

Written by David Pelzer, “A Child Called ‘It” chronicles the brutal childhood of its author. Once the loved and cared for child of doting parents, for reasons never fully explained, David Pelzer becomes the family pariah, abused unmercifully both physically and emotionally by his mother and in turns ignored and shunned by his father and his brothers. At first David Pelzer sees his elementary school as his shelter from the storm of his mother’s physical and emotional abuse, but, forced to wear the same worn clothing year after year and to steal food from his fellow classmates to feed his starving belly, he soon becomes an outcast in the classroom as well as at home. Finally, when he is in the fifth grade, concerned teachers, a school nurse, and the principal finally come to David Pelzer’s aid and call the police to rescue him from his own private hell.

“A Child Called ‘It” is both heartbreaking and disturbing. How could a mother force her child to eat his own vomit, attempt to burn him on a gas stove, ignore the stab wound she inflicted upon him, and force him to steal and eat food that even the dogs did not want to touch? It is unfathomable, but, according to David Pelzer his mother did all this and more. One of David Pelzer’s brother’s has spoken out and said that the abuse was never as horrible as his brother claims, but child abuse is inexcusable no matter the extent of it.

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli

Milkweed, authored by Jerry Spinelli, is the first-person narrative of a young, orphaned Gypsy boy in Warsaw, Poland, during World War II. First calling himself “Stoptheif” and on his own in the streets of Warsaw stealing bread from rich ladies with fox-fur stoles the boy is soon adopted by a band of orphans headed by a red-headed Jew named Uri. Uri takes “Stoptheif” under his wing and teaches him how to survive in the treacherous times they find themselves in and renames the boy “Misha”. Time passes and Misha and the other orphans, minus Uri, are moved into the Jewish ghetto. With his protector gone, Misha soon earns his place in another family, the Milgroms, by using his “Stoptheif” skills to escape the ghetto in the night and forage for food in war-torn Warsaw.

Milkweed is unique in the historical Young Adult novel genre in that the history is hidden behind the story. The timeline of Milkweed is fluid and references to the specific facts of World War II are few and far between. Instead it is the personal affect on Misha— his run-ins with the Flops, his fright when he cannot squeeze back through the wall and into the ghetto after a night of ransacking the rich homes of Warsaw for rotten food, his frustration with his adopted sister Janina Milgrom who follows in his every footstep, even becoming a smuggler like her brother—that tell the true story of the suffering in Warsaw, Poland during World War II.