RELUCTANTLY ALICE

In this third book about the heroine of The Agony of Alice (1985), Alice is hoping to make seventh grade the year that everybody likes her—a tall order when she begins by getting on the wrong side of Denise, an awe-inspiring bully. Meanwhile, the normal uproar continues in her motherless three-person family: older brother Lester, who can't bring himself to choose between two girls, also becomes the object of Alice's two best friends' schoolgirl ardor; and even Dad, to his own astonishment, is caught between two women—with Alice's well-meaning interference adding to the confusion. 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.