Product Description

Eleven-year-old Alice Duncan has a problem: her body is, literally, growing up too fast. Gawky, innocent, and tongue-tied, Alice is taller than her teachers, with long, long legs and a voluptuous chest she refers to it as 'The Breasts.' One Pill Makes You Smaller brings to life the surreal experience of being a girl-stuck in a woman's body. Dierbeck shoots down the rabbit hole of 1970s misbehavior, combining her modern tale with the fantastic universe of Alice in Wonderland, set in the black-lit, drug-infested art world of Andy Warhol's Manhattan. When Alice is shipped off to a freethinking art camp in North Carolina, she encounters J.D., a sweet-talking adult man who engages her in a dangerous flirtation. This deliciously pop, self-assured debut is an inspired paean to lost innocence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #292049 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Set in the bell-bottomed, experimental 1970s, Lisa Dierbeck's debut novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller, features a smart, young protagonist on a long, strange trip. As if she consumed a cake marked "Eat Me," Alice Duncan feels monstrously tall for her age. At 11 years old she stands 5'7" and fully developed, and beautiful too. Alice wants people to notice her collage artwork, but seems only to attract the sort of attention she's too young to know what to do with.

Borrowing from Lewis Carroll's classic, Dierbeck sends Alice on a similarly startling and surreal journey--spooky and compelling and drug-filled like the Jefferson Airplane song based on the same book. Alice's parents are as absent as those in the original story, leaving her under the care of her coke-snorting teenage half-sister, Aunt Esme. The rabbit hole in this case is The Balthus Institute, a dilapidated summer camp in North Carolina where Aunt Esme sends Alice so she can pursue a rock star in Los Angeles. Upon arrival Alice discovers that Balthus is less an art institute than a mental institution, populated by a tiny assemblage of strange and threatening inhabitants. Arrogant twin sisters take the place of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the Cheshire Cat appears in the form of grinning J.D., a drug dealer and seducer who leads Alice down a dangerous path. By the end of her harrowing journey, not even a bottle marked "Drink Me" could bring back Alice's lost innocence. A convincing, disturbing read. --Brangien Davis

From Publishers Weekly
Channeling Alice in Wonderland (and, naturally, the 1970s Jefferson Airplane song, "White Rabbit"), Dierbeck shoots down the rabbit hole of '70s misbehavior with this psychedelic debut, crafting a weird and inspired paean to lost innocence. Eleven-year-old Alice Duncan is, in her own opinion, a freak: "a kid's head grafted on a woman's body." Hit on by her classmates (and their fathers), she is forced to fend for herself while her half-sister, Aunt Esme, experiments with all manner of pills and powders in their apartment on East 67th Street in New York City. Abandoned by her father, Dean, a once-respected artist who has checked himself into a mental institution, and her mother, Rain, now cavorting around Italy with her lover, Alice finds solace in her inventive collages of rock stars and pop icons, finally begging her father to come up with the money to send her to art camp for the summer. Esme, who wants to head for L.A. to be with rocker Crash Omaha, happily ships her off to an arts program at the Balthus Institute in Dodgson, N.C. (where "about ninety-eight percent of your acquaintances are going to be junkies. The other ten percent will be acid heads"). Alice lies about her age and falls in with a dangerous crowd, including Esme's primary drug supplier, J.D., a 30-something predator once dismissed from Columbia University, who deals her a dose of reality as he sees it and introduces her to words like "corrupt," "seduce" and "rape," which had never before been a part of her lexicon. This unsettling and disorienting-but also deliciously pop-account of deplorable actions and shattered innocence is a tour de force, a meshing of the myths of the counterculture with the fantastic universe of Lewis Carroll. It's a genuinely original, compulsively readable first novel, sure to stir up controversy.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Alice, 11, weighted down with "The Breasts" she has prematurely developed, and abandoned by her parents, spends her summer making collages and munchie runs for her 16-year-old Aunt Esme and Esme's dope-smoking friends. When the teen decides to follow a man to L.A., Alice is packed off to "the Balthus Institute," a once-thriving art camp that now, in the 1970s, is more like a half-deserted art commune. A few jaded, thrillingly cool teenage students flop around campus, one or two professors show up from time to time, and the only person who pays much attention to Alice is J.D.-a 35-ish, rough-faced Cheshire cat of a man full of cosmic aphorisms and confusing vibes. Maintaining the illusion that she is as old as she looks, Alice soon finds herself in the midst of a slow, insidious seduction. Dierbeck is brilliant at capturing what it feels like to be a young girl looked at by an older man: a sense that one is powerful and in control; sort of disgusted by how predictable even an adult male can be; but also a bit intrigued by how far can she take things. J.D. is supremely, evilly frustrating as he convinces Alice that she is acting autonomously. Riveted female YAs will pass this loss-of-innocence tale from friend to friend urgently, and it will resonate with all who read it.
Emily Lloyd, Prestwick House, Dover, DE
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Relentlessly depressing
I can't recommend this book very highly not least because it was so completely sad and depressing from the first page to the last. Save for Alice, the main characters in the book were all abhorrent individuals without any redeeming qualities whatsoever and included the obligatory drug dealer (J.D.), drug abuser (Esme), pedophile (Rabbit, J.D. etc.), crappy parents (Dean and Rain), and mean-spirited people (Faith and Hope). And of course poor Alice gets bounced around between them like a pinball, and not surprisingly her life goes into a tailspin (and this is hardly what I would call a "coming of age" story as one reviewer put it). I do think that the author's premise--an 11 year old girl who looked much older--made for interesting possibilities in terms of how society deals (or fails to deal well) with that kind of thing (although even here I was puzzled because most of the time the author makes her sound like a 22-year old Playboy playmate or a Barbie doll in terms of her physique, but then she tells us that Alice looked only 3 to 5 years older than 11. There are not too many girls I know--even if they do look 14-16--who have that kind of body.) Anyway, the point is, I was surprised where the author took her premise-i.e. setting Alice amongst these total losers in 1976. Another thing I noticed is that the book had much more of a 1969 Woodstock-type feel to it than 1976--I realize that those dates are only 7 years apart but there is still a big difference between 1969 and 1976. If the story had been set in the present or if there were a wider mixture of characters in the story (say, for example, some actual normal people), I would have been interested to see where that went. Finally, I did not like that virtually the entire last third of the book is one single incredibly depressing scene in which Alice's life is essentially taken away from her.

what did I miss?
I don't remember the 70's as being as spectacular as the author depicts it, but apparently some of the themes in this book are similar to what the author experienced when she was growing up. She said that she developed breasts at the age of 8 and went through embarrassing situations.

Whatever...so book basically centers around the 11 year old Alice and her 'womanly' body and J.D., a drug dealer who wants nothing than to seduce Alice. The art pretext is just something to fill up the book and give Alice a reason to be in J.D.'s universe.

I found J.D. to be annoying at best. Much of the dialogue is annoying. For example:
"Are you even listening?" said J.D. He sounded upset.
"Who are They?" Alice asked.
"Who are who?" said J.D.
"You said They got to me. They taught me. Who are they?"

If you like listening to two stoned people talk while you're straight, then this is the book for you.

J.D., Rabbit and Crash Omaha are the kind of sleazy guys that must have been running amok during the 70's. They're all about getting girls to do things they don't want to do. Alice and Aunt Esme apparently hadn't heard of the women's movement because they give in to everything and everyone. It's a bit depressing.

J.D. in particular spends most of his time convincing Alice to do things. It takes many pages of inane dialogue to get her to give in. For the stoner he is, I'm surprised he has the energy.
If J.D. existed today he would be considered a homeless, slacker pedophile.

an interesting book that doesn't quite ring true
this narrative purported to stay in a child's point of view but faltered time and again. an eleven year old kid would not have the art vocabulary that the author forces into this child's dialogue.

the best parts of this book dealt with a young girl's feelings towards a society and body that is forcing her to grow up too quickly. if you are interested in early puberty and being reminded of how many men and teens sexually prey on children, you might like this book. but you'll be disappointed with the author's lack of critical examination of this.