ALICE IN LACE

An eighth-grade health class assignment gets Alice McKinley and friends thinking about choices and consequences in this eighth installment of one of the best series running. Each student is handed a hypothetical situation that must be handled as if it were real: Alice and Patrick are to marry, honeymoon, and set up a home on $5,000; Pamela is pregnant; other classmates have to buy a car, arrange a funeral, and the like. For Alice, who already suspects that life is an "obstacle course, with detours, yield signs, stop signs, and cautions," the assignment turns out to be fraught with eye-opening difficulties and tough decisions. Naylor (Alice the Brave, 1995, etc.) delivers Alice's observations in her usual direct way, surrounding them with hilarious dialogue, plus new episodes in the love lives of Alice's father and older brother. When a willful classmate mendaciously accuses a teacher of making a pass, and a neighbor goes into labor, Alice finds herself in challenging situations that are anything but hypothetical—and comes through with flying colors. Pleasure and purpose are seamlessly combined in this comic, expertly crafted episode. (Fiction. 10-13)