![]() This week, Simon & Schuster published the series’ final installment, “Now I’ll Tell You Everything,” which follows Alice from ages eighteen to sixty. In the past twenty-eight years, Naylor has written twenty-seven more books about Alice, tracking the strawberry-blond daydreamer from the slumber parties of elementary school (there are three prequels to “The Agony of Alice”) through the emotional gauntlet of high school. “We really don’t have any choice, Alice,” Mrs. “Sometimes I think I’m growing backward,” Alice says, fearing that she’s lagging behind as her peers glide smoothly toward maturity. Plotkin, a teacher Alice had once dismissed as a “human pear” unworthy of pre-teen admiration. After the ruined pageant, Alice tearfully confides in Mrs. In a fit of onstage pique, Alice yanks the long, flowing hair of one princess-a rival student named Pamela-and derails the entire production. ![]() The pivotal scene in “The Agony of Alice,” Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s 1985 novel about a sixth-grade girl on the unsteady cusp of puberty, takes place at a school pageant, in which the heroine, Alice McKinley, has been consigned to the unglamorous role of a bramble bush, a prickly backdrop to several crooning princesses. For a gawky, impulsive, twelve-year-old girl who badly wants to be seen as both beautiful and funny, there are few occasions more perilous than a school performance. ![]()
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