Reluctantly Alice
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Seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don't mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she's okay. She's neat.”
ALICE COMES HOME FROM SCHOOL ON THE
first day of junior high with a list of seven things about seventh grade that stink. Just about the only good thing she can think of is that she's friends with everyone. Maybe that's how to survive seventh gradeâmake it through the entire year with everyone liking her.
That turns out to be easier said than done, when Alice gets on the wrong side of the school bully, Denise “Mack Truck” Whitlock. But Alice's problems with Denise pale before the romantic entanglements of both her father and her older brother, Lester. And when Alice decides to help them out, life gets even more complicated.
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COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER ⢠NEW YORK
AGES 10â14 ⢠0511
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Here's what fans have to say about Alice:
*
“Alice and her friends seem sooooo real!!! They go through all the problems life throws you!! I'm not saying that I like seeing people go though problems, it's just that it's great to see you can get over these problems and have a great life too.”âdragnfly
“I feel like Alice is my next door neighbor and Elizabeth lives across the street from me. Pamela is in most of my classes at school and Patrick is my childhood best friend. Sometimes I wish soooooo badly Alice and everyone in these books were real.”âLeslie
“I think that what I love most about your Alice books is that they are so real. The things that take place in the books are things that have happened to me. . . . It was so amazing to read your books and think, gee, that happened to me.”âa fan
*
Taken from actual postings on the Alice website. To read more, visit
AliceMcKinley.com
.
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PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
includes many of her own life experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults, and is the author of more than one hundred and thirty-five books, including the Alice series, which
Entertainment Weekly
has called “tender” and “wonderful.” In 1992 her novel
Shiloh
won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.
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Reluctantly Alice
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BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
Shiloh Books
Shiloh
Shiloh Season
Saving Shiloh
The Alice Books
Starting with Alice
Alice in Blunderland
Lovingly Alice
The Agony of Alice
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of
Reluctantly Alice
All But Alice
Alice in April
Alice In-Between
Alice the Brave
Alice in Lace
Outrageously Alice
Achingly Alice
Alice on the Outside
The Grooming of Alice
Alice Alone
Simply Alice
Patiently Alice
Including Alice
Alice on Her Way
Alice in the Know
Dangerously Alice
Almost Alice
Intensely Alice
Alice in Charge
Incredibly Alice
Alice Collections
I Like Him, He Likes Her
It's Not Like I Planned It This Way
Please Don't Be True
The Bernie Magruder Books
Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink
Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies
Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel
Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor
Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup
Bernie Magruder and the Pirate's Treasure
Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril
Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry
The Cat Pack Books
The Grand Escape
The Healing of Texas Jake
Carlotta's Kittens
Polo's Mother
The York Trilogy
Shadows on the Wall
Faces in the Water
Footprints at the Window
The Witch Books
Witch's Sister
Witch Water
The Witch Herself
The Witch's Eye
Witch Weed
The Witch Returns
Picture Books
King of the Playground
The Boy with the Helium Head
Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear
Keeping a Christmas Secret
Ducks Disappearing
I Can't Take You Anywhere
Sweet Strawberries
Please DO Feed the Bears
Books for Young Readers
Josie's Troubles
How Lazy Can You Get?
All Because I'm Older
Maudie in the Middle
One of the Third-Grade Thonkers
Roxie and the Hooligans
Books for Middle Readers
Walking Through the Dark
How I Came to Be a Writer
Eddie, Incorporated
The Solomon System
The Keeper
Beetles, Lightly Toasted
The Fear Place
Being Danny's Dog
Danny's Desert Rats
Walker's Crossing
Books for Older Readers
A String of Chances
Night Cry
The Dark of the Tunnel
The Year of the Gopher
Send No Blessings
Ice
Sang Spell
Jade Green
Blizzard's Wake
Cricket Man
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
A
THENEUM BOOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Book design by Mike Rosamilia
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.
0311 OFF
This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition May 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds
Reluctantly Alice / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.â1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Alice experiences the joys and embarrassments of seventh grade while advising her father and brother on their love lives.
ISBN 978-0-689-31681-4 (hc)
[1. SchoolsâFiction. 2. Single-parent familyâFiction. 3. Family lifeâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N24Re 1991 [Fic]âdc20
90037956
ISBN 978-1-4424-2361-9 (pbk)
978-1-4424-2361-9 (print)
978-1-4424-6578-7 (eBook)
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To Catherine Wood, my college speech teacher, who generously considered my writings entertaining, and to Marion Tucker, an early editor, who helped make them better
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Thirteen: Questions and Answers
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THE SEVENTH THING
IN SEVENTH GRADE, YOU GROW BACKWARD.
In sixth, I kept a list of all the things I learned that showed I was growing up, and another of all the stupid, embarrassing things I did that proved I wasn't. Most of the time they were about even. If I still kept a record of all I've done, my “backward” list would run right off the page. In a single dayâthe first day of seventh gradeâI accidentally squirted a teacher at the drinking fountain, tripped on the stairs to the second floor, and sat on a doughnut in the cafeteria.
“Who put a doughnut on this seat?” I asked the girl next to me.
“It's for Kim,” she said.
Now what kind of an answer was that? But even Patrick laughed when it happened.
“Well, how are you liking junior high, Al?” Dad asked that night while we were fixing dinner. My name is Alice, but he and Lester call me “Al.”
“Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me next week.”
“That bad, huh?” said Lester. Lester's almost twenty and catches on quick.
“I can think of at least seven things about seventh grade that stink,” I told him. “The boys are shorter than the girls, the math is too hard, Mr. Hensley has bad breath, there isn't any toilet paper in the johns, we're going to cook liver in home ec., and half the drinking fountains don't work.”