Alice and the Fly

February 29, 2016
When Greg “Fly” Hall, a teenager from wealthy Skipdale, falls for a girl named Alice from poverty-stricken Pitt, he imagines that he can save her from her abusive father and bully of a brother. But Greg—labeled “psycho” by his classmates for his uncontrollable fits, lisp, and non-communicative nature—faces a challenging route to protecting Alice. With his workaholic father, dance-obsessed sister, and social-climbing mother involved with their own interests, Greg resigns himself to following Alice and watching out for “Them,” imaginary spiders that threaten to devour Greg and those he loves. Told alternately through Greg’s diary and police transcripts, Rice’s debut maintains an atmosphere of increasing dread as Greg gets closer to an approaching party and as memories from his youth, including a boating accident and a dementia-afflicted grandmother, feed into his paranoia. Despite the misguided help of his teacher and his mother, Greg skirts closer to psychosis with chilling nightmares that indicate his schizophrenic state. In the heartbreaking ending, Rice poses compelling questions about guilt, responsibility, and the culture of objectification that lead to Greg’s final acts. Ages 12–up.

March 15, 2016
A schizophrenic English youth is destined for tragedy. Greg is a dysfunctional, shy, white teen with a severe lisp and a dark, muddled past. In an effort to make a connection, his English teacher asks him to write everything down in a journal. Rice's debut novel is made up of that journal's pages interspersed with police reports and interviews between officers and Greg's acquaintances. As Greg pines for a girl he barely knows and rants about Them, spiderlike creatures that only he can see, readers will quickly realize that Greg is schizophrenic and in dire need of help. Through Greg, the author shines a light on the many ways society fails those with mental illness, and readers are held captive in Greg's psyche hoping for someone, anyone to notice that this boy needs a second look. The interspersed police reports provide readers with their only glimpse of the world outside of Greg's point of view, and the tragic tone these interviews take does little to give readers hope. These interviews muck up the book's pacing a bit. Greg's story is quickly revealed to end in violent tragedy, and after 200 or so pages of Greg's brooding, many readers will be impatient. Supporting characters are poorly drawn, most given just one or two defining characteristics, and the police interviews don't flesh them out. A flawed novel examining a worthy subject. (Fiction. 14-18)

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Starred review from April 1, 2016
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Here are some things we know about Greg: at school he is called Psycho; he takes medication for his condition; he suffers from arachnophobia, and when he has a spell, he sees spiders everywhere; he is obsessed with a red-haired girl named Alice; his mother drinks to excess; and his father is a philanderer. We know these things because Greg records them in the journal his sympathetic English teacher has given him. Mixed with his journal entries are transcripts of interviews the police are conducting with those who know him. But what has happened? Rice does a superb job of using this device to generate suspense and, increasingly, dread. In the meantime, Greg records his story in a flat, affectless, but increasingly moving voice as we get to know more about his problems, among them the boys at school who torment him and Alice's beast of a father. Things come to a head on New Year's Eve, when Greg goes to a wild party hoping to see Alice there. But will he? Debut novelist Rice has turned in an extraordinarily accomplished effort, beautifully plotted and structured, emotionally resonant, and filled with multidimensional characters, especially, of course, Greg, whose condition of being is never less than persuasiveand that will excite a keen empathy from readers. May he have many of them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)