All Alone in the Universe

by Lynne Rae Perkins

Book Overview

"Before last summer Maureen and I were best friends....At least I think we were. I don't know what happened exactly. As some people who get hit by trucks sometimes say, 'I didn't see anything coming.'"

When her best friend since the third grade starts acting as though Debbie doesn't exist, Debbie finds out the hard way that life can be a lonesome place. But in the end the heroine of this wryly funny coming-of-age story--a girl who lives in a house...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380733021
• ISBN13: 9780380733026
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 7.5"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

A surprising find

All Alone in the Universe is for anyone who remembers middle school as torture, often at the hands of peers. It's also for people living through middle school right now. (To whom I say: survive. Things will get better.) The basic story line isn't much. Debbie and Maureen have been best friends since third grade, and now Maureen is moving on, leaving Debbie behind - and alone. Debbie records this with a great deal of insight and wisdom, and almost painful honesty. She also throws in nifty illustrations and a lot of small vignettes, some of which are very funny, all of which demonstrate the way people, sometimes strangers, can change your life. Debbie is helped through her crisis by lots of unexpected people - a gardener and his employer, her English teacher, a girl her own age even more outcast than herself - and learns that some small acts of kindness can have an effect out of proportion to the effort required to make them. The message is twofold: you can live through change and loss. And we can all help others sometimes - and we all need help sometimes. This is a small book with surprising depth. Buy it for the middle-schooler in your life, but be sure to read it for yourself, too.

A Must Read for Middleschoolers

As a middle school teacher teaching at an all-girls school, I found this book incredible. Adolescence is a time of turmoil within self and friendships, and this book is very realistic. I see friendships crumble almost daily. I see the girls who get hurt and the girls who do the hurting.This book may just make the breaking up of a friendship easier to bear. It's so good, I plan to read it to my summer school class.

This is an exceptional book

I am an Orthodox Jew with a large family, and I took this book out for my 11 year old daughter, and I started reading it and couldn't put it down. Then my wife read it and couldn't put it down. There's a lot of wisdom here. It reminded me a bit of the introspection of Catcher in the Rye, but it was brighter and more current, of course. It's about relationships, how we can see each other forming a network of mutual helpers. I and my wife loved it.

Fan Mail From Some Flounder

This book is a quiet and elegant delight. I enjoyed it, and my eleven year old daughter is thoroughly enjoying both the text and the illustrations. (My personal favorites: the Insul-brick drawing and the fake-wood desktop owl face.) Who else but Lynne Rae Perkins would think to render such things!

A heartbreakingly funny, moving, beautifully written book

There's not a whole lot that happens in this book--it's basically an account of how one girl gets dumped by her best friend and then gets over the heartbreak of being cast aside. But the book is an amazing little gem, both funny and sad and full of casual profound moments that the narrator comes upon in really natural ways. The prose is sharp and funny and nicely complemented by the author's hilarious pictures.The best compliment I can pay to the work is to say that I wish I'd read this book when *I* was thirteen and coping with the painful fact that my best friend and I had grown apart. It would have made a world of difference to me. A great book. Enough said.