Come and meet Alice. Here she is on the brink of being a teenager and discovering that life is just one big embarrassment. Things are not made any easier by the fact that she has no female role model - Alice's mother died when she was four - so there is just her father and older brother - and what could they possibly know about being a girl and growing up? Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's lively, witty style, mixed with poignance and percepton, has captured the essence of adolescent anxieties as we follow Alice through the trials and tribulations of growing up.