Review: When Audrey Met Alice

When Audrey Met Alice by Rebecca Behrens
Grade: B-
This e-galley was provided by Netgalley and Sourcebooks Jabberwocky in exchange for an honest review.
Summary: First daughter Audrey Rhodes can't wait for the party she has planned for Friday night. The decorations are all set and the pizza is on its way. But the Secret Service must be out to ruin her life, because they cancel at the last minute-citing security breach and squashing Audrey's chances for making any new friends. What good is being "safe and secure" if you can't have any fun?

Audrey is ready to give up and become a White House hermit, until she discovers Alice Roosevelt's hidden diary. The former first daughter gives Audrey a ton of ideas for having fun...and more problems than she can handle.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: This was a really cute read.  I thought Audrey was precocious and a perfect young teen, trying to figure out who she is and what she can do with all the changes resulting from becoming the First Daughter.  Some parts were a bit too typical of MG and YA fiction (the mean girl, how Audrey falls for her best friend, the adult who wasn't a parent but was sort of in charge of Audrey, etc.), but I thought this book overall was fun.  I loved reading the fake diary entries from Alice Roosevelt; they felt very real and I almost forgot that she didn't have a long-lost diary.  However, I was bothered by how Audrey didn't think her various rebellions through and how the adults blew many out of proportion (the dress incident, the incident with the cigarettes, having a friend over...), but perhaps those can all be explained away as growing up.  However, Audrey was very much treated like a child yet also treated like they expected her to act like an adult.  Those scenes were very frustrating.  It was awesome that Audrey's mom was the president, and I loved seeing scenes with Audrey's dad, the "First Gent."  Language and romance were mild.  One of my biggest issues with the book was how much I felt the gay agenda was forced on me.  When it was first mentioned in passing that Uncle Harrison lived with his partner Max in Wisconsin, it didn't bother me too much because it was just a brief reference.  But then as Audrey began to champion gay marriage and events like that, I very much felt like a certain agenda was being forced on me.  I don't enjoy that in books; I don't even like it when Christian lit gets too preachy.

The Verdict: A super cute read that I'd love to recommend to everyone, were it not for a certain political agenda being forced on me.