This third installment in the series continues Alice’s saga through her younger years as she enters adolescence. The story finds Alice in seventh grade navigating the dynamics of junior high school, which are much trickier than middle school. With the previous grade paling in comparison, she finds 7th grade to have more cons than pros but has hope of turning things around. The mission is to try and have everyone like her, even the school bully, which seems a rather impossible task. Moreover, the narrative explores other themes including romantic relationships, adolescent curiosity, sexual awakening, and unlikely friendships.
The plot revolves around Alice in her pre-teen years grappling with factors that define this critical age. Most of all, she craves to be liked by everyone, an endeavor the father states will only lead to a bland and uninteresting personality. The message of the tale is that you cannot go your whole life impressing everyone and should embrace your uniqueness. However, she manages to nurture a friendship with the bully Denise by choosing her for the group project as her partner. Furthermore, the narrative focuses on the puberty of young girls through the changes and new interests that accompany that age. It delves into the curiosities of adolescence, which take Alice on a book hunt for her friend Elizabeth to have a glimpse of the male anatomy. From a single-parent household, she also finds herself at the center of her father and sibling’s love lives.
Though the book has been banned in certain schools for its depiction of sexual content, it offers a clear look into young adolescence. Kirkus Reviews wrote “More episodic than its predecessors, but Naylor's keen observation of such preadolescent preoccupations as curiosity about the bodies of the opposite sex, and the comic situations in which her pungently unique characters become embroiled, rival Byars for pure entertainment grounded in good sense and family values.”
