"The Truth About Alice" attempts to flip stereotype on their head to challenge ideas like the 'school slut' while diving into high school cliques. Blame is an overarching theme with an attempt to have you see the more 'human' side behind selfish actions. At times unfortunately, this book becomes a moralistic story rather than a human one.

With four different perspectives, the story jumps between past and present, revealing what happened with Alice to put her in this position in the first place. What's the most difficult about this is that the reader is not really given a reason to be invested in the Alice's truth. We want to hear from her perspective, and we don't until this end. This was an obvious stylistic choice by the author, but fell flat.

In part, I think this is because the "nice boy" character, Kurt, has ulterior motives from the start. Is he really as nice as we're led to believe, or does he just want to be with Alice? I can't shake the feeling that it's still all about the romance for him. Alice's lack of agency throughout and Kurt's silence after their one chance to talk only reinforce this trope of a boy 'saving' a girl in a romantic guise. It's a tired theme that this book doesn't quite freshen up.

The Truth About Alice
By Jennifer Mathieu
June 3, 2014

The story is about Alice Franklin who is a high schooler at Healy High when rumors are started about her and two other boys.
When rumors start there is nothing she can do.

This is not a fluffy contemporary, it is a dark young adult book. This book has tough issues.

I think what made this book so relatable was that everyone has been bullied once in their life, maybe not as harshly as Alice, but we still have at one point. Bullying has affected everyone in some ways. It was so easy to feel for Alice.

Thank you to Roaring Brook Press and NetGalley for this digital copy.

5 out of 5 stars

I was always taught that there were two sides to every story and the truth was somewhere in between. In The Truth About Alice, we see many sides of the story, but only two people know the truth about what happened one night.
In the telling of this story through the lenses of all these characters, the reader learns a deeper truth about each person. It turns out that the truth of the story is not about what really happened, but about each character's reaction as the story unfolds. We get to know these characters on a deeper level. I don't think that I'm stretching it to say that we get to know how each person will react to the drama of life, and whether they are more or less likely to succeed or to fail to find happiness, or achieve goals, or even how they will embrace change.
And, in getting to know them, we get to know a little bit about ourselves. The Truth About Alice is not about Alice at all. It's about us.

The Truth About Alice, by Jennifer Mathieu, is a powerful novel about bullying, stereotypes, grief and more. The novel is told in many different viewpoints, all telling the story of Alice - or what they thought was the story of Alice. Rumor was that Alice had sex with two different guys on the same night, making her the biggest slut of the school. Rumor also was that Alice was sexting the popular player when he crashed his car and died, making Alice the slut who killed the football star. Alice changes from a semi-popular teenager into a shell of herself from the relentless bullying. Alice's POV isn't told until the very end, right as the truth is unraveled.

A little bit too perfect in the end for such difficult topics, but I appreciate the way Mathieu tackled such difficult topics with grace.

The Truth About Alice is inspirational, heart breaking, emotional, compelling, and a story that ALL TEENS should be required to read before they enter High School and lose their damn minds over their social status or losing friends that they've had their entire lives. It is a hard subject to read about, but one that nobody should feel squeamish about reading, or passing on to their friends, or recommending to others who may not think that The Truth About Alice isn't for them.

This book was requested when I was young and requested more books than I could possibly read. Sadly, I no longer have access to this book and my tastes have changed. Thus I will not be able to give feedback on this title.

My Amazon account was hacked and had to be closed. After creating a new account, I lost the arcs on the original account which includes this title.

This was such an amazing book. It was a little dragging in the beginning but I was able to enjoy reading it. Readers would love the story. This has a sentimental value to me.

This book was absolutely amazing. I was hooked from the very first page and I needed to know what had ACTUALLY happened. I liked that Alice was very human and did make bad choices, she wasn't just misunderstood. Overall, a beautiful and heartbreaking telling of teen life.

This was a story that hits so close to the bone. The subject matter is very real and if you don't think so then it's only because you have never had to endure lies, the hate and bullying that others have. It's a very emotional book told thru varying characters points of view.

This was such a hard-hitting book that appealed to me and I think that all young women in their lifetime should read as well as should be in high school libraries.

Ok, yes. this book is filled with ALL the high school tropes we know:

There's the jocky dude-bro who dies while drunk-driving, the closeted football player who can't admit he's gay, the popular cheerleader whose home life is not as great as it seems, the girl with the hyper-religious mother who turns out to be a complete hypocrite, and the mega-nerd smart guy with no friends.

There's also Alice - a regular girl who is pretty nice, and has kid of a crappy home life who ends up becoming the pariah in her small town when everyone decides she is the town slut AND responsible for the jocky dude's death.

The story is about Alice, yes but it is told through the eyes of everyone around her - so you only get snippets of the truth here and there. It's a good, honest portrait of how teenage minds can work sometimes, and how their sometimes terrible, shallow decisions can spiral out of control.

High school is a tough time for teens. The cliques, the rumors, the bullies. Alice has to deal with all of this.

Rumors about Alice start after a party and everyone thinks she is responsible for a fellow student's death. And more. Can Alice survive the rumor mill and the bullying, waiting for the truth to come out?

This is a very realistic look at what our young people are having to go through as they transition to adulthood. I'm not sure why society, and other teens, make it so hard for others but this book is definitely an eye-opener about this time in their lives. Hopefully it will make people stop and think about how they treat others.

I really enjoyed The Truth About Alice, even as I watched Alice struggle. This is the first book by Jennifer Mathieu that I have read but I'm going to check out her other books now.

Confession: I was with that book in my kindle for a long time.
I decided to read and saw parallels with the 13 Whys tv show.
There's a death, but not by suicide, but by a car accident.
And it seems that the main culprit of this is Alice (as if she had personally killed Brandon).

Each character, friend or hater of Alice, shows their point of view about her and about what happened (or at least what they THOUGHT that happened).
Because there was a party where Alice slept with two guys.
She gets called by all the ugly names.

And Alice, what did she do?
Just at the end of the book, the reader becomes aware of who is really Alice.

The narrative is very interesting.
The feeling I felt was that I didn't feel any nostalgia for my high school days. Gossip, envy, insecurity, all this can lead a young person to commit barbaric acts. That is why the level of suicide has increased so much in recent years.

A book to make you think, more than to entertain.
4 stars

I am unable to review this book, unfortunately, as a very long time has passed and I have lost the egalley. I am sincerely sorry! I will give an average of 3 Stars review since the book offered much promise but I didn't find the time to read it.

I found this book to be something I normally wouldn't pick up, but I'm glad I did. The story was a quick read, and it was interesting to read the different perspectives from all of the classmates. I thought the writing was well done, and the story was a good read.

The Truth About Alice is a quick read, and I was able to read it in one night. It was well written but also painful because I could see the direction the story was headed, and it wasn't going to be a good place. My heart went out to Alice right away.

Told from the POV of four different (yet stereotyped)characters, The Truth About Alice is a brutal and realistic look into how horrible teens can be to one another. The way Alice was bullied was heartbreaking, and by the way, she received no solace at home because her life there wasn't much better with a mom who's checked out mentally and physically.

I fully expected to hate the popular girl who threw the party, Elaine, the most, but I ended up hating Kelsie, Alice's ex-BFF, more. I felt the rumor Kelsie began spreading about Alice was way over the top, and while she did it out of sheer desperation, I still wanted to wring her neck. I mean, wow. That was messed up.

The friendship that blossomed between Kurt, stereotyped as a social misfit, and Alice was a breath of fresh air. I think Kurt was my favorite character because he was there for Alice when no one else was. I knew what he was thinking and that his motives were pure since I got his POV.  

Josh, the survivor of the car wreck, was just kind of blah for me. I thought the secret he was hiding was interesting, and I caught on to it right away; however, he didn't have much of his own personality.  

My mind is blown by how simultaneously amazing and scary one lie can snowball into so many and ruin so many people's lives in the process. Just when the rumors seemed like they couldn't get any worse, they did.

I couldn't put The Truth About Alice down. The deeper I became immersed in the story, the more information I was given which allowed me to start piecing together what really happened that night. There were some surprises along the way, and once I finished reading, I took some time to digest it all.

I did take off a star for the characters being entrenched in stereotypes. Otherwise, I do recommend The Truth About Alice, especially to teens who can likely (and unfortunately) relate to the bullying and rumor spreading that goes on in this book.

What an amazing book. A lot of my students were able to relate with the main character. Thank you so much for the digital copy. My school purchased a few copies for my class.