12-year-old Alice McKinley's main worry these days is how to become a teenager, the problem is that she doesn't know how. Her mother has been dead for years, and what do her father and her nineteen-year-old brother, Lester, know about being a teenage girl? And to complicate matters more, her family has just moved to a new suburb in Washington. If only she had a role model, like the beautiful sixth-grade teacher Miss Cole. But instead Alice gets assigned to plain, pear-shaped Mrs. Plotkin's class. Is Alice doomed to a life of one embarrassment after another?