15-year-old Alice is a shy girl who has problems relating to her parents; her primary confidante is her new diary. When the family moves for the college-English-professor father's new job, Alice apprehensively approaches the unfamiliar and befriends another shy girl, Beth, who shares her outsider status. But when summer separates them with Beth leaving for camp, Alice finds herself befriended by the "in" crowd, who introduce her to drugs. She likes how drugs make her feel less inhibited and is thrilled to be involved with college-man Richie. But she becomes addicted, taking uppers to deal with her parents, then sleeping pills to get off the drug-induced highs. She abandons Beth and gets to feeling that drugs are the only things that make her happy, until she and her "in" friends all must get involved in pushing drugs to keep themselves in cash. Eventually she realizes she's on a downward spiral and doesn't know how to escape. She eventually gets help from a priest and a psychiatrist. Her parents had always trusted her and once their eyes were opened to what she had been doing, they want to support her in the best way they can. Alice will have to do much on her own to beat her addiction, but what might not help is her parents' view that she needs to confront the world, which means confronting her past in the form of her old drug-using friends. —Huggo