It’s Alice—for the rest of her life! Yes, the very last Alice book, and it reveals every last bit you’d want to know about Alice—including whether she spends the rest of her life with Patrick! Alice McKinley is going to college! And everything, from her room to her classes to her friends, is about to change. Stoically, nervously, Alice puts her best foot forward…and steps into the rest of her life. Just how crazy will her college life get? Will Alice’s dream of becoming a psychologist come true? Are she and her BFFs destined to remain BFFs? And with so many miles between them, will Alice and Patrick stay together…or is there a hot, mysterious stranger in her future? As Alice well knows, life isn’t always so predictable, and there are more than a few curveballs waiting to be thrown her way. This is it. The grand finale. You’ve loved her, you’ve learned with her, you’ve watched her grow up through twenty-eight books. And now everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Alice McKinley will be revealed! Gr 9 Up–This final book about the popular character begins with Alice McKinley heading off to college and continues up to her 60th birthday. Longtime readers of the series will enjoy following Alice; her older brother, Lester; and her lifelong friends Pamela, Elizabeth, and Gwen as they choose careers and life partners. Alice has two children who teach her a few things about what it must have been like to parent her when she was young. Naylor discusses controversial issues, especially those relating to sex, with an admirable frankness, but readers may find her stilted language and didacticism off-putting. Most of the earlier books cover a few months and, in cramming more than 40 years into this final entry, The author sacrifices some of the character and plot development that grounded her earlier works. Now I'll Tell You Everything can feel like an outline of itself, with sketchy details added in around major life milestones. Beautifully described moments–like Alice and her former classmates opening a time capsule compiled by their 12-year-old selves–pepper the novel, but unless readers have grown up loving Alice, there may not be enough to keep them reading.–Gesse Stark-Smith, Multnomah County Library, Portland, ORα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Naylor has given fans a gift: the chance to see how life unfolds for a beloved character. This 500-page farewell is the twenty-eighth title of a series that began in 1985, and it opens when Alice is 18 and headed off to the University of Maryland. Alice remains “the practical, sometimes funny girl who never met a question she didn’t ask” throughout her life, as we follow her from college to marriage and babies, all the way up until the eve of her sixtieth birthday. Because Naylor is covering forty years here, the pace moves at quite a clip, particularly once Alice graduates from college. Obviously, teen readers will be most interested in those college and postcollege years and may find their interest waning as Alice deals with the challenges of middle age. Oh, and you’re probably wondering about Patrick, Alice’s boyfriend since the sixth grade (well, apart from that brief ninth-grade breakup). Do they end up together? Not telling. It’s a long good-bye, but devoted fans won’t want to miss it. Grades 9-12. --Ann Kelley Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written more than 135 books, including the Newbery Award–winning Shiloh and its sequels, the Alice series, Roxie and the Hooligans , and Roxie and the Hooligans at Buzzard’s Roost . She lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. To hear from Phyllis and find out more about Alice, visit AliceMcKinley.com. Now I’ll Tell You Everything 1 THE U OF M The day I left for college, Lester borrowed a pickup for all my stuff. “Anything that can’t fit in the back can’t go, Al,” he said. “I’ve got to take my beanbag chair. That’s a must,” I declared, jumping down off the back end and wiping my hands on my cutoffs. “Take it! Take it!” Dad said. “Just promise you’ll leave it there.” We joke that while some kids suck their thumbs all through childhood and others hang on to a blanket, I’ve kept my old beanbag chair as a sort of mother substitute, a lap to cuddle in when things get tough. Mom died when I was in kindergarten, and I’ve had that beanbag chair almost as long. I’m even too big for it now, but I could always use it as a hassock, I figured. All morning Elizabeth, Pamela, and I had been carrying things out to the truck. Gwen’s brothers had helped her move the day before, and Liz would leave for Bennington the next day. I was taking some stuff to my dorm at the U of Maryland and was lucky Liz and Pam were still around to see me off. We were standing out on the driveway in our shorts and T-shirts, studying the mountain of junk in the pickup, trying to think of anything I might have forgotten. “Ironing board?” said Elizabeth. She’s the gorge