Summary
book review for Alice Rue Evades The Truth.
Alice Rue Evades The Truth
by: Emily Zipps
October 28, 2025, Dial
336 pages
When half of my country is covered in snow, and I desperately need a distraction from flight cancellations, all I really want to do is curl up with a mug of something warm and a good book. For winter storm Fern I had to forgo the mug – school closure = swarming young people = hot liquids too precarious – but the book I chose more than made up for it. Emily Zipps’ debut, Alice Rue Evades The Truth, is hilarious, relatable, and warmed me from the inside out.
Alice is no stranger to weather. Living in Portland means there is a whole lot of cold and rain adding to the drab feelings she already harbors from her boring job as the overnight receptionist for an office building. The good news is that while the weather is immutable, Alice’s life is not. The book opens with Alice performing CPR on a building tenant who just passed out in front of her. She’s got a massive crush on the guy, and it would suck for him to die before they’ve ever even had a conversation. Luckily, Alice manages to save his life. Unluckily, EMS personnel assumes she’s the dudes girlfriend, and his family shows up to whisk her off to the hospital with them to sit a the bedside of her comatose “boyfriend.”
Does this sound ridiculous? It is. And watching it go down is laugh out loud funny. Alice tries many, many times to set the record straight. But apparently, nothing about Alice is straight, as we learn when the comatose guy’s butch sister, Van, shows up. Alice can’t seem to extricate herself from the incredibly sweet family, and now she’s wondering if she’s had a crush on the wrong sibling this entire time. Turns out the man she’s been pining after for years is a total jerk, but his sister is both hotter than summer in Miami and cooler than my current weather situation. Plus, the feelings Alice is catching appear to be reciprocated by Van.
This is soap opera level drama, but Zipps never takes herself too seriously. Alice Rue Evades The Truth does not try to pass this bizarre situation off as anything other than extremely dysfunctional and abnormal. In doing so, it becomes delightful. I laughed so many times I lost count, and it’s been a while since a read had me smiling this much. Spice/heat level is medium, and the hottest bit is actually in the epilogue.
Alice also provides something I have been seeking and failing to find in other places – a character that is poor but whose issues are not related to money. It is refreshing to have a character who has to think about how covering the coffees for the entire family in the hospital might affect the rest of her budget for the month. Yet her mission in the book is not to get a better paying job etc. It’s to get over her attachment issues so she can form meaningful relationships. She also makes no bones about the fact that she has no desire to have children of her own. She does not hate kids, she just doesn’t want to raise them herself. This is rare representation, and it is much needed.
When even shoveling out your front door seems impossible, it’s good to read about a hopeless situation actually working out no matter how implausible it seems. Alice and Van are the most caring, gentle couple. They deserved their happy ending. I’ll take reading their story over lying on a beach somewhere any day. (Bonus though – you could read this on the beach and achieve both things simultaneously).