“You’re so fucking pretty, Alice,” said Rabbit. “Why are you so completely gorgeous? Huh?”

Alice didn’t answer him. Silence, she’d found, was the best response. Rabbit was lying on Aunt Esme’s bed with his dirty motorcycle boots propped up against the wall.

Alice Duncan is no ordinary eleven-year-old. Due to the premature onset of puberty she looks three to five years older than she is. She has been singled out as rare, odd, and unique with "a kid's head grafted on a woman's body."

The children at school make fun of Alice, calling her "Gigantor" and "Stacked." Unknown boys approach her in the street and, out of the blue, offer to buy her stuff. Male teachers take her aside for quiet personal chats and her friends' fathers are hypnotised by her breasts. Alice's freakish body upsets and embarrasses her, as does the attention it attracts from men. She doesn't understand the implications of the attention.

The eleven-year-old protagonist lives in Manhattan under the erratic supervision of her sixteen year old Aunt Esme. When Alice was nine, her carefree, jetsetting mother, Rain, ran off to Rome with a man named Knut, to design shoes. Her father, Dean, an emotionally tortured artist famous for his paintings of adults wearing baby clothes, lives in a psychiatric institution. There is no order or stability in Alice's life; she and Esme survive on cookies, pizza, and spaghetti with miniature meatballs eaten cold, straight from the can.

School has ended for the summer, and Alice spends her days making collages and fetching “munchies” for Esme and her delinquent, druggie friends. Although she is not allowed to take drugs, she sits with Esme when she and her friends partake of a mind-blowing assortment of pills, powders and weed.

Esme decides on a whim to fly to Los Angeles to meet up with Crash Omaha, a previous fling and fly-by-night rock star. Expediently, she bundles her niece off to an arts camp for gifted children called The Balthus Institute.

At the unorthodox summer camp Alice meets the gifted, sophisticated twins, Faith and Hope (modelled on Tweedledum and Tweedledee.) She also encounters the Cheshire Cat in the form of a sweet-talking and dangerous drug-dealer J.D. who is twice, even three times her age. The dilapidated camp mirrors Alice’s emotional alienation. It operates on a skeleton staff, a few professors drift in and out of classes and the young students are left to their own devices.

By turns humorous and menacing, the eccentric, anarchic J.D. begins to pay Alice a great deal of attention. She can't decide whether to be flattered or frightened, but it becomes obvious that he thinks Alice is older than she is as he sets about seducing her with vigour and persistence.

Alice feels herself expanding and shrinking like her surreal namesake. She is smart and mature in many respects, but in others she is innocent and naïve, for example, she doesn't know what the words "virgin", "seduce", "corrupt" or "rape" mean.

Comparisons with Vladimir Nabokov’s young “nymphet”, Lolita, are inevitable. The first derivation of the term “nymphet” comes from the Greek and Roman nature spirits, who were usually pictured as beautiful maidens dwelling in mountains, waters, and forests; the second is the entomologist's term for the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis. Alice considers herself neither alluring nor seductive. Indeed, she wouldn’t understand the meaning of the words. Despite her physical appearance, psychologically she more closely resembles a young, incompletely formed insect than a mythological maiden.

The pace of the book picks up in the second half as Alice's seduction is unveiled at the hands of the perverse and predatory J.D. She becomes too confused to speak out about what is happening to her. Dierbeck writes with subtlety and deftness raising questions about paedophilia, sexual deviance, culpability and what constitutes molestation:

"That's right," he said, offering her his hand. "You do like it. You do." What happened between them would never feel, to Alice, like J.D.'s doing. It would seem for many years afterward as if she'd raped herself."

The author powerfully describes the most turbulent moments in a young girl's life and the emotional and physical borders she crosses, with uncomfortable honesty, an alert imagination and a strongly original mind. She skilfully uses elements of the surreal and the absurd to disorientate the reader, using mythology reminiscent of fairytales and children's literature.

Despite contemporary advertising campaigns fetishising young girls and focusing on the eroticism of youth, the subject of sexuality and barely pubescent girls is still mostly a societal taboo. Dierbeck's chilling debut creates revulsion and a sense of horror within the unwary reader as she successfully captures revealing details of social behaviour, moral atrophy and the essence of the permissive seventies.

One Pill Makes You Smaller is an ambiguous, thought provoking coming-of-age story. It deals, sometimes graphically, with difficult and controversial subject matter. Be warned: you may feel you've fallen down a rabbit hole and smoked a hookah once you've finished reading this hallucinatory, mind-bending book. Curiouser and curiouser!

Michelle McGrane is a freelance writer, reviewer and poet. She lives in South Africa.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.