Alice in Bed

by Cathleen Schine

Book Overview

Stricken by a mysterious malady, college sophomore Alice Brody has suddenly lost the use of her legs. How does a bright, beautiful, and now immobile young woman proceed with her passions? As she convalesces in a Manhattan hospital, Alice finds herself attended by a motley group of visitors: indifferent nurses, doctors both good and bad, divorcing parents, and eccentric relatives. But Alice is a creature of many charms, whose wit can enchant those...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250002400
• ISBN13: 9781250002402
• Release Date: January 2012
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Painful, sexy and hilarious

I've read this book several times and each time I'm struck by it's raw power, delivered with such skilled and playful style that it is all the more effective. It is a book about illness and pain where I don't think the word "anger" is ever used. Alice is a girl we recognize completely but Schine has created her with a fresh perception and gentle wit that in some ways reminds me of Barbara Pym's heroines.

I was a patient, too.

For those of us who have been physically impaired and/or very ill, scared to death children in adult bodies, lost in the mad world of medicine, a must read. A stinging and witty critique of being a patient from the inside out. We can feel and identify with her pain, her fatigue, her helplessness and her addiction to pain and dysfunction. Then, vertical once again and walking the world of "healthy" people, we can feel the fear and pain of being "healthy" once again and still being desperately stuck in life in general and wanting to cling to the comfort of illness and hospitals. It will mean a lot, if you've been there. Written like one who's been there and who has the gift of storytelling to spit every syllable back out in plain, human language.

great book - plain and simple

This was a book I read a long time ago, and it was one of the first books that I noted didn't follow a set pattern or formula. Alice's affair with the doctor came as a surprise as well as the flirtations with her mother's eccentric boyfriend. This book doesn't disappoint, you feel Alice's pain, the physical pain (laced with appropriate sarcastic remarks) as well as the emotional pain she feels when going from a healthy young woman into a bedridden sour soul, back into an upright citizen. I read this book at least 3 times it was that enjoyable, Alice was a fun character to revisit. A+

An hilarious but gut wrenching novel about a girl's illness.

An unusually fresh and astringent comic novel that manages to convey the experience of a terrifying and agonizing illness, as expenienced by a teenage girl, without a hint of cliche. The characters are wonderful, the novel engages the reader on every page. It's sexy and funny and painful.

Engaging - amusing with a quirky, sarcastic heroine.

This books pulls you through unwittingly to the end leaving you wondering how you could possibly be finished already. Alice is a 19 year old curmudgeon on the outside with a soul of a lost child on the inside. --- one question --- do doctors really sleep with patients?