The Clique Antidote: The Alice McKinley Series

What if after skimming one or more of Lisi Harrison's The Clique series (see my post of May 30), you wished out loud that there were some really well written, really popular novels about a more realistic character than Massie and her chosen sycophants? Well, there are and if you're in the right demographic, you may even know their main character.

The series is, of course, the Alice McKinley series, eighteen titles out and still going strong, by Newbery Award author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Beginning with Starting with Alice in third grade and taking her into her sixteenth summer in Alice in the Know, Naylor has created a character so normal, so honest, and yet so vulnerable to the passage from childhood to young womanhood that she seems like someone we have always known, perhaps someone a lot like ourselves.

Alice is not one of your pampered rich bratz; she's a solidly middle-middle class girl in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., living without her mother, who died when she was four, but with her steady, understanding, and thoughtful father and her witty, sometimes exasperating, but mostly kind older brother Lester. With their help and her own common sense and empathy, Alice and her friends find their way through the problems of 'tweenhood, some as minor as boys who put gum in one friend's long hair and some as critical as deciding how to say "no" to Patrick, who is Alice's off-and-on boyfriend. As she passes through seventh and eighth grade, Alice loses her cat, loses her comfortable boy-girl relationship with Patrick, only to renew it again and again, deals with a tough-girl bully, moves to a new home and school, watches her father date, separate, and finally marry the woman who eventually becomes Alice's stepmother, and sees her brother juggle girlfriends, go on to college, and move into adulthood.

Along the way she and her friends deal with getting their period and cope with a "Critical Decisions" unit in social studies (in which Elizabeth must "buy" a car, Pamela is "pregnant," and Alice and Patrick "get married,") which requires learning to budget and dealing with authority figures, from oily used car salesmen to funeral directors. Alice and her friends encounter a classmate's suicide, eating disorders, lesbian classmates, getting and losing jobs, sex education, and being "in" or "out" with the "beautiful people." Through it all, Alice's empathy for others and common sense serve her well as she copes with the milestones young people meet as they come of age.

Alice's junior high years are chronicled in the titles beginning with Reluctantly Alice and ending with The Grooming of Alice. Although not the central theme, these books deal honestly and frankly with the questions and experiences that concern Alice's growing awareness of sex and its place in relationships.

These concerns become more central in the books which deal with Alice's first two years of high school, beginning with Alice Alone and continuing through Alice in the Know, as Alice meets the challenge of algebra, making and losing friends and boyfriends, interracial dating, casual sex and serious sex among her friends, and developing a vocational interest in journalism--not to mention passing her driver's test!

Since Beverly Cleary tracked Ramona Quimby from pesty preschooler to independent fourth grader, no writer has created a character so eloquently, feelingly, and developmentally as has Naylor in her Alice McKinley books. There's a book for almost any age reader at any stage of childhood, 'tweenhood, or teen years in this series. Most are wonderfully moving and involving, and none trivialize the process of coming of age.

Word has it that Naylor plans a final novel which will take Alice well into middle age. It sounds like an impossible tour de force to project this character into the unknown zone of the next forty or so years, but if anyone can carry it off, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and Alice McKinley can!