TeenLit Book Reviews

Alice the Brave is by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. It is about a girl named Alice McKinley who faces many of the problems teenage girls confront. In this particular book Alice is afraid of deep water, but by the end of the summer Alice overcomes her fear. Alice’s mom died when she was four years old of Leukemia. She lives with her dad and her brother Lester who is twenty-one. She doesn’t have anyone to talk to about personal things besides her two best friends Pamela and Elizabeth, but Pamela and Elizabeth are pretty much clueless about them also, so Alice has to call her Aunt Sally long distance in Chicago. Aunt Sally is a little paranoid though. The biggest problem Alice had was her fear of deep water and all of her friends are going to spend most of their summer swimming at Mark Stedmeister’s pool. Alice trys to make up excuses of why she can’t go in the pool , but after a big incident at the pool, Alice learns to swim, with some assistance of Lester and goes back and shows all of friends she indeed can swim. This was a wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone who likes to read books that are humorous, realistic, and about adolescense.