Winner of the Children's Choice Book Awards' Teen Choice Debut Author Award

Everyone knows Alice slept with two guys at one party. When Healy High star quarterback Brandon Fitzsimmons dies in a car crash, it was because he was sexting with Alice. Ask anybody.

Rumor has it Alice Franklin is a slut. It's written all over the "slut stall" in the girls' bathroom: "Alice had sex in exchange for math test answers" and "Alice got an abortion last semester." After Brandon dies, the rumors start to spiral out of control. In this remarkable debut novel, four Healy High students tell all they "know" about Alice-and in doing so reveal their own secrets and motivations, painting a raw look at the realities of teen life. But in this novel from Jennifer Mathieu, exactly what is the truth about Alice? In the end there's only one person to ask: Alice herself.

An Amazon Best Teen & Young Adult Book of the Month, June 2014: The rumor mill has always been a side effect of high school, but thanks to cell phones and social media, a story can now spread at warp speed. The Truth about Alice is what happens when a teen girl is targeted as a slut, courtesy of party gossip. Before things blew up, Alice had been liked well enough by the other girls and attractive to the guys at her small Texas high school, but was uninterested in being part of the "in" crowd. Multiple narrators tell the story of how one unchecked rumor took on a life of its own, and the individual motives of those closest to it. The voices are authentic and reveal how destructive the desire for popularity can be ("if you give people enough time, eventually theyâ??ll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world ") as well as the flip side--resilience in the face of injustice. --Seira Wilson

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