The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson is a hard book to categorize. It's about teenagers, but is written for adults, with plenty of sex and drugs and shocking behavior. It takes place in a well-to-do suburb of San Francisco, following a group of kids as they grow from middle-school twerps to high-school aged perps. "Look at what awful things your despicable children could be doing!" This book screams this at every turn. First they gang up on a boy in middle school with unrelenting cyber-bullying until he jumps from the Golden Gate bridge. Then one has an affair with her teacher, another runs an SAT scam when not dealing drugs, a third runs away to star in gay porn films ... the list goes on, each chapter more tawdry than the last. At the center of it all is new teacher Molly, who wants to connect with the "cool kids" (she wasn't one herself), and thinks they're all angels and that she alone can make a difference. Molly is you, by the way, the parent who has their blinders on and thinks their child can do no harm.

Is this a cautionary tale of what parents might expect from their children these days? Besides the cyber-bullying, which wasn't available to us gen-exers, there's nothing in here that couldn't or didn't happen to teenagers a generation ago. We've just all glossed over those days, moved on to respectable adulthood, but then love to read about naughty teenagers in almost a cathartic way: "I was never this bad," or "My kids aren't doing this." Well, you might have or they might be, but do you really want to read a whole book about it? Still not sure what the answer is to that one.