There is not a lot to say about this competently written female coming of age story (except for this bit: “Allegra went to a place that specialized in tea that looked like a haunted house...”). Alice, a Toronto girl, has managed to get to first year at McGill University in Montreal without even having a boyfriend, let alone having sex. She is not sure she will ever understand the complexities of life and relationships; she is away from home for the first time, and desperately looking for her place in the world. Coming from a very sheltered middle class background, she’d like to express her passion for life, but simply doesn't know how. Her roommates are much more worldly. Allegra is an artist and a free spirit. Cricket is an athlete, rather obnoxious, and jealous of Alice for becoming friends with Allegra. Alice’s best friend from home, Bethany, is a stick in the mud.
Then Alice meets Nellcott. He is in his early twenties, works in a record store, and expresses his rebelliousness by wearing eyeliner and smoking cigarettes. As a bad influence he is pretty tame. He is sexually experienced, but folds completely when Alice denies him sex. They sleep together many times but are never intimate. Alice is pretty much a blank page. What exactly Nellcott sees in her is difficult to fathom. Nothing much happens.
Alice is a very awkward girl, trying to figure out life. She seems impossibly naive, and everyone seems way too nice for 1990s university students.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)

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When she got in his tall bed and lay down it was so high that she felt like the princess and the pea only it was coins that were under the mattress. He let her spoon him but it was never the other way around. She was learning to rely on his smell. Up close, he always smelt like fresh laundry which overpowered the cigarette smell that hung in the air. When she looked down, his boots were poking out from under the sheets.

Alice Darling has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how she’s still a virgin and how she’ll never figure it all out.

And then she meets Nellcott Ragland, a 23-year-old who works at Basement Records and wears black eyeliner, and he asks her on a date.

Alice tries to hide out in the Film Society office. She spies on Nellcott at the record store. She gets advice from Walker, her filmmaking, womanizing friend from Toronto. But sooner or later her parents are going to visit and watch her cry. She won’t admit it to them, but Nellcott has become her darling.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Alice in Transition, Aug 6 2005

By	don ward - See all my reviews

I am no expert in girls coming of age. If you doubt me, ask my daughter. Still we could all be better for knowing Fried's Alice. Alice is more amenable than Jane Eyre and more secure than Franny Glass. She is the emergent heroine for our era.

Golda Fried's language is economical and sincere. Her episodes ring true. Her analogies are sound. You'll laugh out loud at her metamorphisis. It is our own.

Read it.

Don

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