Ever since Alice arrived at first grade dressed as a hobbit and endured a week of increasingly violent peer rejection, she has been home schooled by her hippie mom and indifferent dad, leaving her with what her therapist calls "a shocking poverty of age-appropriate real-life experience." Now Alice’s inept new therapist, Death Lord Bob, has cornered her into agreeing to go to the public high school. Actually, this fits right in with Alice’s career aspirations to become a cultural critic, and her eighties style statement would be working out pretty much all right (especially after she gets a great haircut somewhat by accident) if it weren’t for her old nemesis Linda, now grown seriously homicidal, and her two head banger henchmen. Alice’s sensible observations are a rich source of humor in this very funny first novel, as she tries to get her life together in spite of the peculiar aberrations of the "normal" teen and adult population of Smithers, a small ingrown town in British Columbia where entertainment opportunities are limited to excuse-to-drink events like the Northern Saddle Sores’ Family Trail Ride. Her mother is the kind of tie-dye clad woman who holds a sage-burning ceremony for safety before starting out on a back-to-school shopping trip, and her friends include bookstore owner Corinne, who is allergic to books. Her romance-writing father’s poker cronies are equally colorful: gay but style-challenged Finn and taxi-owning Marcus, who has a succession of twenty-years-younger girlfriends who need a ride. When Alice’s sullen girl cousin Frank arrives, a parents’ nightmare with her bizarre outfits and stuffed-animal backpack filled with bottles and baggies, Alice observes the resulting hullabaloo with amused satisfaction, and after a hilarious, precarious car trip to a Fish Show and Drum Workshop, she finds herself well on the way to acquiring a friend and a boyfriend. Older teens will enjoy the story and the many descriptions of wacky clothes if they can get past the misguided cover, a picture of five-year-old Alice"s chubby hobbit-clad legs. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell