What I’ve decided about life is this: If you don’t have a mother, you need a sister. And if you don’t have a sister, you need a bulletin board.
The library gods did not bless me with an original Alice cover this time. Instead, I got this paperback thing that’s fine, but it definitely fails to communicate how weird All But Alice is. Here’s the cover I remember from my childhood.
Before we get into the book, here’s a story that’s maybe depressing or maybe just showcases the passage of time. Last month I was visiting one of my childhood libraries, the one we called the “big” library in downtown Mansfield. It’s hard to describe the vibe of the Mansfield library if you’ve never been, so I’ll just say that it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my years of visiting libraries. It’s a singular experience. Anyway, I was hanging out in the children’s area with my son, admiring all the changes they’d made since I was a kid, when I decided to see if they had any Alice books in stock. This was the library where I most often checked out Alice books, finding the paperbacks stuffed into those rotating clear shelves. They weren’t there, so I checked the catalogue to see if they were at any other branches. Reader, they didn’t have them. There were maybe two Alice books in physical copies anywhere in the system. Some of the others were in e-book or audio. But some, including The Agony of Alice, weren’t available at all. I don’t fault the library—it’s a smaller system, there’s limited space, and the books are old. But it made me incredibly grateful for the Columbus library system, which (so far!) has at least a couple of copies of every Alice book. For now. Time marches on.
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