about Jennifer Mathieu
Mathieu is an experienced writer whose background enriches her powerful storytelling. She originally worked as a journalist, equipping her with the skills to frame the intense high school rumors in this novel. Now, she is a writer of young adult novels and currently an English teacher, which gives her deep, firsthand insight into the issues facing her young adult readership.
She grew up on the East Coast of the United States but now lives in Texas with her family, lending a broad perspective to her work. Her ability to blend her understanding of media, education, and teen life makes this one of the most resonant novels I’ve reviewed.
plot of the truth about alice
The core idea of Jennifer Mathieu’s The Truth About Alice is good: using four different viewpoint characters to essentially gossip to us about Alice Franklin. This novel was a 2014 release in the US but is being published for the first time in the UK, which is great to see because it deals with similar themes to her 2017 novel, Moxie. I was really excited to find her first book on NetGalley after falling in love with Moxie over the summer last year.
The entire story centers on Alice, who might or might not be a slut. Everyone knows she’s a big slut just ask anyone because she slept with two guys at one party. Oh, and thanks to the rumour mill, Alice is on the hook for “causing” the car crash that claimed the life of Brandon, the quarterback. So, she’s basically a pariah in Healy, a Stereotypical Conservative Small Town in Texas that cares deeply about reputation. This book explores these events through the perceptions of four people involved in various ways.
The first narrator is Elaine, the host of the party and girlfriend of Brandon. She threw the party where Alice earned her ultimate slut title. Elaine is too much the popular girl, but we learn about her frustration with her mother’s Weight Watchers obsession and the pressures that moulded her into the perfect, pretty Healy girl.
Next is Kelsie, Alice’s former best friend who throws her under the bus in a big way and is responsible for spreading even worse rumours. Kelsie confesses to us, unburdening herself of all her insecurities and the truth behind what happened between her and Tommy Cray That Really Awful Stuff. Kelsie is too much the follower, but if you’re not brain dead, you will figure out long before she spills the beans what this Stuff is.
The third narrator is Josh, Brandon’s best friend. Josh simply appears to be your average bro-jock (or is it jock-bro?) at first. Then, as he recounts his memories with Brandon, we see other facets of Josh. Compared to these three, Josh is interesting; he is not quite as interesting as the others but his perspective as a loyal guy makes me feel sympathetic to him.
Finally, there is Kurt, the nerd who pines after Alice throughout high school and now sees a chance to swoop in and be the friend she needs. Kurt is super-smart and therefore largely outside of Healy High’s social hierarchy. He uses Math tutoring as a way to get close to her. Kurt’s development is a little disappointing because it’s so on-the-nose for his archetype too much the awkward outsider.
Mathieu takes pains to make each narrator’s voice distinct and believably adolescent in cadence and vocabulary. This first person structure is a powerful device, and I was so impressed by seeing as it would have been so easy to make the girls and the boys POVs blend. I don’t like that this structure by its very nature diminishes Alice’s own role in her story.
We don’t really get to meet the real Alice until she has the final word, which means the impact of those words isn’t very powerful. While Alice’s chapter serves to resolve the story, it can only offer us trite concluding remarks because we don’t know the real Alice well enough. For such a short book (only 200 pages), I felt like I got so much detail about each character. The only reason I didn’t give it four stars is because I felt that it was too short in places, and I would have liked if Alice was given more voice, rather than a few pages in place of an epilogue.
Just like Moxie, everything that happened in this book could happen in any school, anywhere in the world. I’ve heard so many of the rumours spread about Alice over my time in secondary school and it’s just a fact that gossip will never die. Mathieu manages to deal with sensitive topics with ease, and make me feel sympathetic towards bullies and boys that believe in the friend zone, which shouldn’t be possible she might be a wizard! The whole narrative of rumours and innuendo is powerful, making this the kind of book you want to read in one sitting and then pass on to your best friend. If you enjoy books that deal with slut shaming, feminism, and the good old rumour mill, this is perfect and pace-y and needs to be on your TBR. Share this!
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