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.
Tragedy strikes in middle school, when friendless Tristan Bloch slips a love note to Cally Broderick, who bows to peer pressure and shows the note to the popular boys. The resulting cyberbullying firestorm ends in Tristan's suicide, a shock that resonates through the student body as the kids 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. 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, made possible by plenty of money and little parental supervision.
Sharp, sarcastic and wise, Johnson's novel also displays unexpected kindness in its devotion to showing the struggles motivating the teens' behavior, each a product of a family and society that force-feeds them too many expectations coupled with limitless freedom. 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