It's Just so stupid, asking us to write our life for homework. It's not even a weekend!

Alice Williamson-Stone doesn't see how she can write her life story as a class assignment. How can she fit 9 1/2 years into a couple of pages? Anyway, what's interesting in her life is not the "family and pets" stuff her teacher asked for. Her pets have died, and the only family she has is her mother. Until recently she had a beloved, interfering grandmother--Gene--but she's gone from Alice's life. Besides, as Alice discovered ages ago, she was born by accident, and that's the sort of private thing you don't write about for school. Alice does the assignment but she thinks it's pretty boring, until in doing it she discovers a need to write about her true life--the exciting, complicated, private parts.

In her secret notebook, Alice begins to write her"{ilustrated} ortoblography." Alice writes about her mother's difficult early life and her determination to become a "professional single parent." She writes how Gene, her absent father's mother, came along, and how she changed Alice's life, making it richer in experience but also more complicated. And she records on going quarrels between her mother and grandmother about how to bring Alice up, which ended with the Big Row. Now Alice has just her Number One person, her mum, struggling with problems of money, career, health, where to live, and how to manage on her own--problems Alice can only deal with by writing about them. Except when she tries to help . .

Lynne Reid Banks offers a compelling story of a creative child caught in the middle of a difficult, but very real and increasingly common situation. Poignant, funny, and startlingly honest, Alice-by-Accident is certain to touch the heart of any child who has ever felt different, and of any adult who has to deal with the problems of children who come by accident.