From Austria

Question:

i am 18 years now (august 2011). i am from austria and began to read the alice series when i was about 12 years old. i sort of “scoffed” the books, but then, i couldn’t read the following ones because they weren’t translated to german and my english wasn’t that good back then. i read many other books and the alice series was blocked out by them. one day, i must have been 14 or 15, i “mucked out” my book shelves and found the alice books i had bought in the past. immediately i remembered how impressed i was by them and how much i liked them – so i turned on my computer; i wanted to see if there were any more books in german out now. and they were! i liked that i was the same age as alice was in the first book i read then. from that time on, i always read the books at the time alice was the same age as me. not exactly the same time because i was born in december, but if alice and me would have gone to school together, we would have been in the same grade, lived the same summers etc. so now, i graduated two months ago and had time to read “incredibly alice” after my graduation because there was so much to do before it. anyways, when time came to read “including alice” i started to read the books in english, because i couldn’t wait for the translated version. for me, alice is some kind of a pen friend living in the us. i can understand her feelings, her problems, i recognise situations of my own life. i got to know the american school system. i’m just so glad i once found the alice books in the local library (the first six, at least).

now i took a look at the homepage and saw, that all this will end in 2013. and that i can’t read the book that fits to me now, now that i’m living my summer after graduation.

i always wanted you to never, ever stop writing the alice series. NEVER! i wanted to grow older with alice by my side. at least i wanted her to go to university the same time i do (coming fall). what to i write here? is this some trying of begging you to not stop? guess it’s not, even if i really feel to do so. but it’s not up to me. (but if you think about continuing and there’s a balance between the reasons for and against it, and you need one more voice to get a final decision, i beg you to take mine into consideration.)

now i feel i have said a lot – enough for you. first, i wanna say THANKS for reading this – if you do/did so at all.

and then.. there’s some big THANK YOU that’s in my throat wanting to come out so that you can hear it personally, but as long as this is not possible, it has to rest in my throat and get out of my fingers instead (keypad, you know). 😉 well. T H A N K   Y O U  for having written all those great books, for having created characters i won’t forget, for having put those great stories down on paper.

and now i have to excuse myself for my english – it’s just the english i learned in school and all i have written now just came out my head, no matter whether it’s all spelled the right way or whether i used ungrammatical phrases. hope you get what i want to say anyways.

the best wishes and greetings from austria (austria, not australia.. austria’s the little country bordering germany and switzerland – many people don’t have ever heard of it so i thought explaining wouldn’t be too bad).

Phyllis replied: It’s wonderful to get an email from Austria.  I’m so happy to know you found the Alice books in German, though I understand that some of the translations are very different from the English.  I wish I could go on writing the Alice books forever, but Alice gets older and so do I.  The very last book that will come out in 2013, ALWAYS ALICE, will take her from age 18 to 60.  And she will start college in that book.   I hope you enjoy all the Alice books you may have missed, and very much appreciate your writing to me.