The Truth About Alice by Jennifer Mathieu

I would probably bump this book up to 3.5 stars.  It earns bonus points for making me cry and for forcing me to stay up way past my bedtime on a school night (definite anomaly for a teacher at this time of year).  I really did like this slow unraveling of this story and while some parts were very predictable, I was actually surprised that there were some really original points that I did NOT see coming.  I bumped the overall review down to a 3 mostly because I did not connect to all of the multiple narrators in this story.  While I LOVED the chapters narrated by Kelsie and Kurt (oh the raw pain of the Kelsie chapters), I did not feel like the Elaine chapters were super-realistic nor did I feel the need for the Josh chapters at all.  I would, however, definitely still recommend this book to my students.

Final Recommendations: if you like realistic fiction, bad things happening to good people, high school drama, some mature content, small towns, more high school drama