Lucy in the Sky

March 19, 2012
More sensational than thought-provoking, this diary of a teenage drug addict traces a 16-year-old girl’s downward spiral, beginning with her introduction to alcohol and marijuana and moving on to pretty much every other drug on the market. Driving home the “This could be you!” message, the narrator is portrayed as entirely ordinary: she comes from a loving middle-class family, thinks writing in a diary is “lame” at first, and regularly crushes on boys. The main focus is on the girl’s growing obsession with getting high as she makes one mistake after another, hanging out with an older crowd, trusting the wrong people, brushing aside her older brother’s concerns, and persuading herself she’s in control. The girl-next-door narration relies on clichés and superfluous exclamations (“And then I realized that I felt good! Really good! Deep down to my feet good!”), emphasizing the protagonist’s naïveté. Echoing the theme and structure of Go Ask Alice, this inelegant cautionary tale paints an appropriately horrific picture of addiction, but offers little insight beyond what is taught in drug education programs. Ages 14–up.