The previous post dealt with a banned books list I found somewhere. Such lists intrigue me, and I started looking for banned books that I hadn't read - and found one. Well, more than one, but here's a starting point.
Click to keep reading.
Supposedly the story is based on the diary of a teenage girl who is, at her stone cold sober best, neurotic with typical teenage angst. She's fifteen and attends a party with a group of twenty or so teenagers where she participates in a game they call Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? As it turns out there are twenty people, each of whom is given a glass of some soft drink. Eighteen of these glasses contain a dose of LSD (a crystalline solid, C 20 H 25 N 3 O, the diethyl amide of lysergic acid, a powerful psychedelic drug that produces temporary hallucinations and a schizophrenic psychotic state). She has a great time.
At this point I should mention that the somewhat cryptic title of this novel is copied from the song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, as written and sung by Grace Slick.
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall
After her drug experience she gets involved with druggies and experiments with other recreational substances, including crystal methamphetamine, heroin, and glue. Each time she imbibes she eventually sobers up and swears to herself via her diary that she'll never get high again, but we all know how that goes, because if she never got high again there would be no novel. The whole thing would be a very short story, and that would be that.
For no particularly good reason, Alice runs away from home a few times and isn't what I'd term a complete failure. At one point she and a friend open a trendy hippie style boutique and it's successful. Then everyone gets higher than ten kites for one or two days, and the scene changes radically - not unlike Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Boom, she's back home again and her parents are ecstatically happy to see her.
At the end of the story, some 213 pages down the road, our heroine commits suicide by overdosing on downers (likely opiates, likely heroin) and there are no further diary entries, surprising no one.
My criticisms of the story are that it's supposed to be based on a real diary with real events. I don't think it is. For one thing, the writing is too good. The girl is intelligent and artistically talented, and I'm fine with that, but the real author's age and prejudices leaks into the story from time to time. Another complaint I have is that the author isn't familiar with the drug culture of the 1970s, nor the effects of hallucinogenics. For instance, LSD was used and made famous by Timothy Leary, he of the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' subculture, and there were several experiments done about the effects. None of this is mentioned, nor are the hallucinations Alice supposedly experiences described.
Note that LSD has been officially described as worthless by the United States government, yet a few surprising results have been recorded. Several people claimed that after a single experience with LSD, their addiction to other substances vanished.
On a scale of one to five, five being the highest (pun intended), I'd give it two stars (**) because I'm feeling generous. It isn't a book I'd recommend to anyone, certainly not to a depressed high school girl.
And so I conclude with the immortal words of the dormouse, "Feed your head".
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