A review by finesilkflower
Alice in Charge by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

2.0

It's the first half of Alice's senior year, and her job as features editor of the school paper has her investigating a neo-Nazi group in the school. Though she still has an "understanding" with Patrick, who's away at college, she goes to a dance with a new student, a Sudanese refugee. And she helps ex-special ed friend Amy Sheldon deal with a difficult problem Spoilerwhen Amy is molested by a teacher.

Like all latter Alice books, the writing is fairly tortured and the book is longer, more meandering, and dull than the earlier, middle school era books. However, the three main storylines worked fairly well together, and their weight gave some welcome seriousness and momentum to this volume.

Fashion

"Lori and Leslie arrived in camouflage-type jackets, plaid pants, and purple socks rolled down around their ankles." This is cool look but I wonder why the lesbians always dress identically.

Stray Observations
Spoiler
- I would have liked Daniel Bul Dau to be a bigger character and for Alice to be more interested in him. I was excited when he asked her out, but really she only goes to the dance with him as a friend, she doesn't really date him per se. The book is quite condescending about him, really. He's constantly cheerful and amazed, the perfect grateful refugee. I would have liked to see him have more of a personality beyond his refugee status. He is mainly presented as a sort of exoticized accessory for Alice.  

- This book is also maximally condescending to Amy, of whom Alice simply says, "We've never quite decided what's different about her." Which means, the author hasn't decided. Amy is coded in various books as having Down syndrome, being autistic, or having other forms of neurodivergence, never in a particularly realistic way because it's so nonspecific, and this justifies other characters infantilizing her. Alice dislikes her at first but by this book is treating her like a child in a way that I find more obnoxious, but it's supposed to growth.

- Alice's new volunteer gig on the student discipline committee is chilling. It's presented as this great new method of participatory justice but I don't think students have any business acting as judge, jury, and punisher for other students. The punishments they come up with are impractical, cruel, and unusual.

- There's an amusing sequence where Alice convinces Lester to take her on a whirlwind college visit weekend, and in a realistic way, through her lack of planning/understanding how this works, she winds up not really seeing anything of value. She uses the wrong map, can't find a place to stay, etc. I actually feel like it's a very accurate representation of the futility of college visits: you get there, you're not really sure what you're supposed to be seeing, you just kind of walk around, you end up applying to the schools that gave you a vague "good feeling" (i.e. you were well rested and the weather was nice when you were there). 

- However I want to know where Alice got the impression she could stay overnight in a dorm as part of a college visit. She seems to think that's normal and that she's just a loser for not planning it correctly. But obviously it cannot possibly be a service that colleges offer! Compare how many prospective students visit each college compared to how many unfilled dorm rooms they have at any given time (probably close to 0 during termtime). Anyway, if you could sleep at a college just by saying you were interested in it, I feel like that would be a pretty big loophole for people to exploit in popular tourist cities like DC.

- I like that Alice and her friends decided to trade dresses instead of buying something new for the dance - very frugal and sensible in a realistic Millennial way - but I'm disappointed in her decision to write it up for the paper as a hot new trend, complete with photo of herself, Liz, Pam, and Gwen in each other's dresses (which, to everyone else, would just look like girls wearing dresses: there's nothing inherently "traded-looking" about them). When she got the features editor gig in "Almost Alice," much was made of Alice being superior at the job because she focuses her features on other people, not herself; now it seems she's going the Jacki Severn route and just spamming the paper with vanity puff pieces on herself and her friends. 

- The big conflict in this book comes when Alice is the last person to put the paper to bed, and she slips in coverage of Amy's accusation against her molester. Alice is afraid that if she doesn't make it public, the guy will weasel out of it. The faculty adviser is hugely disappointed in Alice, because she essentially accused someone identifiably without a fair trial, and she didn't run it by anyone else on staff first. It's actually a pretty interesting question of journalistic ethics... though of course it ends up reinforcing this pattern in Alice books, where it turns out the students are too quick to protest/argue/be suspicious, and faculty is on top of the problem all along! 

For example, when Alice expresses concern that the molesting teacher is not being dealt with quickly enough, the principal urges her to hold her horses in the name of "maturity," saying, "'You do understand that we want to make sure of our facts before we put a teacher’s job and reputation in jeopardy? I trust we can count on your maturity as a senior not to discuss it further with anyone until the matter’s resolved.'" Yuck, but Alice readily agrees, flattered, I guess, to be considered "A senior". Later, when the students gossip about the situation, Alice is proud to say, "They looked at me, but they knew by now that I could tell them nothing." Ugh, who could stand to be friends with such a bootlicker?

Overall, the book presents Alice's discretion and obedience to The Process as a virtue, even though she has valid concerns that the teacher in question holds enough power to escape any sort of repercussions: "What I was most afraid of, since there were no witnesses to the act itself, was that Sleazebag would somehow convince the authorities that none of this had happened, that Amy was good at inventing stories, and so forth. That I, as her friend, had got caught up in the drama too." This seems like an extremely rational fear and I'm angry at all the teachers who are making Alice feel like she's paranoid or immature to suspect that!

As in the other books, all acts of defiance against the school administration end up being super anticlimactic. I mean, yes, the molesting teacher is guilty, but the principal dealt with it quickly, and Alice was Wrong to Mistrust. In the end, when Alice's journalism teacher describes her principled stand as "Alice dropped the ball," I'm way more angry than Alice is. 

- I had initially thought this storyline might be PRN's way of apologizing for/fixing the storyline in "Alice in Lace" where the accusations against a teacher end up being false, a highly damaging storyline that reinforces the lie that women make up sexual assault allegations. Yet, when she alludes to that story, the discussion is extremely un-nuanced: "'That was so scary,' said Liz. 'Everybody’s favorite teacher, and we didn’t know whether he’d be back or not.' 'If Dennis Granger never comes back, I don’t think anyone would miss him,' said Pamela."

It is absolutely wild to me that Elizabeth - a sexual assault survivor - would react to the memory of her favorite teacher being accused of molestation by saying it was scary BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T KNOW IF HE'D COME BACK TO CLASS, not because they didn't know if he did it or if he'd do it to them! 

By explicitly contrasting the situations in this way, PRN is doubling down on her insistence that abuse accusations are false when they're against a nice man that people like, and true when they're against someone people already dislike. As I mentioned in my review for "Alice in Lace," she's got it completely backwards. 

- It's worth noting in this racism-centric volume that Alice pointedly doesn't recognize her white privilege at any point. Near the end, understandably terrified to run into a group of neo-Nazis in an empty lot, she thinks of herself as "everything [the group] is against," because they know she has lesbian friends and dated a black guy. She doesn't stop and think how much worse it would be for her if she WAS gay or black in this moment. 

- Curtis Butler's diatribe in the school paper seemed like a reasonable approximation of what a neo-Nazi teen might write when challenged to "keep it clean": no outright slurs, still repugnant views, clearly mostly memorized and jumbled and spewed back from a bunch of online sources. The paper definitely treated its printing with kid gloves, with both a forward by Alice AND an afterward by the school advisor, each stressing that Curtis's views are his own and they're only publishing it to get the undercurrent of anger out in the open. It feels simultaneously like too much and too little. Will he really feel like he's gotten the fair shake he was promised if the disclaimers are longer than the piece? And, at the same time, should they have given him a platform at all? (Revising this review in 2020, I would say no, although I understand why it seemed like a good idea in 2010.)

- It's extremely trippy to read this in the Trump era. Little Obama-era asides about, for example, "the Ku Klux Klan advocating death to the president" really bring home the way that racist extremism has changed its political position in this country. While I ultimately feel that the way the characters in this book reacted to Naziism is woefully insufficient and too gentle ("We recognize that emotions run high on this subject, but we believe that as civilized people, any debate is preferable to keeping our feelings under wraps" barf), I also know that I'm judging in light of the utter failure of those approaches in the last decade. While PRN is often way behind the times when it comes to things like technology and PC language, I have to say that her decision to front-and-center the issue of white supremacy in 2010 was timely.

- Still, the "solutions" proposed seem likely to backfire horribly. Especially this one: "'This is only the beginning of a dialogue we need to get started in this school. We’re thinking of organizing a periodic "talk-out" in January, where we divide students in groups of ten, with a moderator, and everyone can express their feelings as long as they can do it with respect and consideration for all points of view.'" What an utterly perfect storm of a recipe for silencing and traumatizing "emotional" marginalized people and platforming "respectful" monstrous views. 

- It feels realistic to me that Curtis never really "reforms" - he seems to grow disillusioned with his neo-Nazi mentor, but not because he's learning to be less racist. He sort of continues to be racist but is less interested in putting himself on the line about his views. I thought it was interesting when Alice saw a glimpse of his home life (as a customer at his family's gas station), and his dad was razzing him for not being manly enough. It felt like a plausible explanation for why Curtis would glom onto the nearest underground paramilitary group.

- Alice finishes up the book by publishing her much-delayed tribute to Mark. It is the most damning-with-faint-praise tribute I have ever read. I am so insulted on Mark's behalf. It really couldn't be worse.

Quotes & Nitpicks

- I just don't have words for what PRN thinks happens at a gay/straight alliance: "Some of the members rehearsed the crazy skit they’d be doing at the pep assembly the next day, and we laughed and applauded as three guys, dressed as girls in hockey uniforms, and three girls, wearing football uniforms, came face-to-face on a practice field and didn’t know what to make of each other. After circling uncertainly, the football girls tackled the hockey boys, who swung at them with their sticks, and they all ended up in a heap on the floor, where everybody disentangled, hugged, and sang a syrupy rendition of 'People' to hoots of laughter."

- And later: "Just as quarterback defines only one part of who a student might be, Mr. Morrison likes to say, so does gay or straight represent only a part. 'We are the sum of all our parts,' we say at our meetings." I mean... what? I don't think PRN has thought this through. "Being gay is only one small part of who I am" may be, in some contexts, an important message for a gay person to say to straight people, who might otherwise pigeonhole them, but the context would be very different for gay people to go around saying it to each other. If the faculty leader of a GSA spent a lot of time harping on the fact that being gay is only one small part of who we are, I would probably feel that the implicit message is that we were being "too gay" and should tone it down.

- On her college visit, Alice “asked questions whenever I could, even when I knew the answer, just to sample the conversation." This is a cringe but probably realistic high school senior move. Surely there were questions she didn't know the answer to that she could have asked, if only to not waste her own time.

- I love when Lester or Ben say stuff like "Blast it!" It's so quaintly "where the devil are my slippers Eliza."

- Patrick finally "reveals" it was him who kissed Alice in the closet in "Outrageously Alice," though it was revealed in the same book.

- There is an extremely yuck-worthy scene where Patrick talks dirty on the phone to Alice while she's on the porch with her dad.

- There's a fun scene where Alice and her friends sneak into a (not on) hot tub at night. "It was a little weird being in a hot tub without the hum of the motor, the swish of the water, the force of the jets. Like being in a bathroom together with no background music." Does... does she normally have background music in the bathroom? 

- The Melody Inn is closed on Sundays? When does it do any business? 

- "We’ve had assemblies like this before, and like this one, the actors are kids our own age, and the group’s purpose—'to inform, entertain, and educate'—is easy to swallow." This feels like a really weird way for a teen to think about teen edutainment. I'm not doubting that a teen would be able to see through the tactics being used but I don't think she would be like "Yeah, these tactics are working on me. I approve."

- "We went to a chick flick, and Yolanda said we could celebrate the loss of her V card. Gwen said maybe we should just celebrate Thanksgiving break." Can I talk about how mean the characters/narrative voice is to Yolanda? Yolanda is consistently treated as an attache of Gwen, "Gwen's friend," not a person in her own right whom the other characters would presumably have independently relationships with after spending a huge amount of time with her over the last several years. She doesn't have a personality of her own, but seems to exist only to be "bad" (interested in sex, interested in her looks) where Gwen is "good" (conflicted about sex, interested in school). She's always either (1) just along for the ride and not really doing anything, or (2) getting into scrapes that the other girls can disapprove of or "save" her from. Given that she is one of two Black characters with a consistent presence in the books, it's concerning that she is written so unsympathetically.

- After being scolded for her breach of journalistic ethics in the Mr Granger storyline, Alice comments, "I decided I should probably stick with counseling, not journalism, when I got to college.." Because if you ever make a mistake or choice that doesn't turn out the way you hoped, even once, you can just never do that thing again.

- At the dance, Alice sees, "Phil and his date," and I'm reminded how even though Phil is canonically gay and it has been mentioned several times, in moments like this, PRN still shies away from naming, describing, or using pronouns for "Phil's date," or even using a word like "boyfriend."

- "The library had a new policy regarding noise and conversation. You could meet friends and chat before or after school, but it had adopted Amtrak’s 'Quiet Car' policy during school hours." the #1 thing kids understand is Amtrak policy

- "Africa's his country" it's not a country

- Alice cannot go five seconds talking about Mark without damning him with faint praise or distancing herself from him, even when she is explaining why she wants to write him a eulogy in the school paper. "Mark was a good friend—not a close personal friend who confided in me, but a 'group friend'..." Why are you writing this then? 

- Okay, here's the excerpt from the essay on Mark that we get: "He’d say he was nothing special. But Mark was the one—out of the four hundred million sperm racing for the egg just before he was conceived—that got there first. If it had been any other sperm that won the race, it wouldn’t have been the same Mark."

EXCUSE ME????????
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