First-time novelist Lindsey Lee Johnson puts to use her years of experience tutoring privileged teens in Marin County, Calif., in a vividly realized skewering of entitlement culture in one of its favorite playgrounds--high school.
The tragedy happens in middle school, when friendless Tristan Bloch slips a love note to Cally Broderick, who bows down to peer pressure and shows the note to the popular boys. The resulting cyberbullying firestorm ends in Tristan's suicide, a shock that resonates silently through the student body as the children involved progress to their junior year of high school. Newly minted teacher Molly Nicholl begins her career as one of the English faculty at Tamalpais High School blissfully unaware of the Tristan Bloch incident. She can barely contain her delight at the beautiful historic building that houses her classroom, and she eagerly anticipates fostering the potential she sees in each pupil. Her most intriguing student is Calista--formerly Cally--Broderick, who has a talent for writing and is "trying to reach someone; the someone was Molly."
Just as Molly remains unaware of the part Calista once played in another child's death, she cannot see the secret lives her students lead outside her classroom. The designer clothes and fast cars the teens treat as their due hide pain and transgressions made possible by plenty of money and little parental supervision. Aloof, mature Abigail Cress carries on an affair with one of Molly's fellow teachers. Mediocre learner Dave Chu works double time, facing terrible pressure from his parents to reward their sacrifices on his behalf with his acceptance to an Ivy League school. The surprisingly insightful Nick Brickston runs an SAT cheating scheme. Substance abuse, dysfunctional families and the constant struggle to be the smartest, best looking or most talented push the teens to the breaking point, and they might take Molly down with them.
Sharp, sarcastic and wise, Johnson's satire also displays unexpected kindness in its devotion to showing the struggles motivating the teenagers' behavior, each a product of a family and society that force-feeds them too many expectations coupled ironically with limitless freedom. Readers may greedily devour the juicy details of the young and the reckless here but, like Molly, they will find compassion a natural impulse as well. The narrative maintains a brisk pace; it has a tendency to hop from student to student as the plot unfolds, constantly shining a different angle of light into a shadowy corner of the viper's nest. An Up the Down Staircase for the era of free-range versus helicopter parenting, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth reminds adults that adolescence is an exquisitely troubled country unto itself. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: Debut novelist Lindsay Lee Johnson takes readers inside the lives of privileged teens with a reminder that high school is a perilous place.