Never really put it down. An original way to draw the reader into the story at the collective and at the individual level. Each of the characters is unique and special and the basis for their attractions rings true. While there are events that happen, I think they have been presented realistically, with emotion but not out of proportion. The overlap of current events makes the story fresh but it is also timeless. I especially liked the way that the parents are described briefly, in most cases, with I think reflects the space they fill in their children's consciousness. The attention to keeping the story real held all the way through which allow the ending to be both consistent, believable and random. Great read to remind us of a period in our lives and to pause and reflect on it.

4.5 STARS

One of my favorite types of books to read are adult books that have a YA sounding plot. I love to read adult books that are set in high school. As soon as I saw this one, I knew it was a book that I would more than likely enjoy. When I realized it was compared to Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my all time favorite books, I was sold!
This books follows a number of high school students, mostly during their junior year of school. Each chapter or section is about a new student, including two different teachers. It is very hard to keep my attention with that many different character perspectives, but this book did that flawlessly. With each new chapter, I was excited to read about a new character that made up this strange group of kids. It almost felt more like a collection of essays rather than a novel.

I do wish it wrapped everything up a little better. I felt that the story just ended. I would have liked to see more character growth and I think an epilogue could have solved this problem. It was also a bit depressing and sad

Johnson does a great job of giving every character a unique personality which is crucial for following the plot of this novel as there is a huge cast of characters. The plot itself moves quickly, jumping from a tragic bullying incident in eighth grade to the fallout that continues to haunt these characters into their junior and senior years of high school. One downside of the story's pace is that some incidents seem to be skimmed over and aren't fully developed. Also, while the teenage characters are all incredibly realistic, the adults in the novel get the "Disney treatment," where they're either completely out of the picture or are so out of touch with reality that they appear painfully incompetent at their jobs as teachers and parents.

As a teacher, I really related to this novel. I could see some of my students in the characters. Overall, I felt it was an enjoyable, thought provoking read

I might be too old for this book...

Right before high school starts, a bunch of privileged California kids bully a peer into committing suicide. As the kids go their separate ways into different high school crowds, the book morphs into vignettes from each student's point of view. Thrown into the mix are chapters about a young first year teacher who has a difficult time not getting involved in the personal lives of her kids. In fact, Miss Nicholl's POV is the most interesting, and the most successful as a narrative. She's the only character who has any redeeming characteristics at all, which is why I think this was such a tough read for me. She encapsulates the difficulties we're starting to see in our society as millennials try to navigate the real world after having lived in a virtual one their whole lives.

I see the redeeming qualities in this book. I really do. I just had a hard time caring about these self-centered, entitled characters. I get that that's the point of this book, but I couldn't get past it. And since it's a character study, and there's very little in the way of plot, well, there wasn't much left there for me.

http://queenbeebooks.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-most-dangerous-place-on-earth-by.html

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is a series of connected stories set in a California high school. Johnson writes about bullying, shaming, peer pressure and every other negative thing you associate with your angsty, teen years. The teens here are cruel to one another, sometimes maliciously, sometimes without even realizing the repercussions of their words and actions. Social media plays its role but what's really condemning is what teenagers choose to DO with social media. It's like watching a car crash. Every time you're hoping a character will do something redeeming...they don't.

Hard to read, but excellent writing and a meaningful, powerful message. Thanks to NetGalley for this read.

This book was very different than what I was expecting. It was very heavy and very dark, which I knew might be the case, but I had no idea just how much. The Most Dangerous Place from the title references high school. We know kids are cruel, adolescence is hard and grown ups just don't understand. What we don't know is just how true all of those things are. We have a student bullied to his breaking point, we have a student/teacher affair, we have a party gone terribly out of control, we have a teacher that means well but is unclear about boundaries. With all of that said, I now it sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but that's not true, I really did like this book. Due to it's heavy nature and my wanting to bury my head in the sand, it took me a long time to read it. The writing was terrific, the plot points were spot on and flowed nicely into each other. I just had such a hard time returning to these kids and their lives and their attitudes and their drama because it was so heavy and sometimes just evil. I do recommend this book, especially to teachers and to parents that are having troubles "getting" their teens, it may shed some light?

Intention was one thing; it was the smallest decisions that made any difference.
The Most Dangerous Place On Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson is a poignant and solidly written examination of the private lives of a group of entitled, unaware teenagers and eager teachers at a wealthy, suburban high school. It begins with a group of seemingly perfect middle school kids as they begin to set the ranks within their group- who is in and who is out. A note and the bullying of the boy that wrote it highlights the quantity of and effect of cyber-bullying that many kids endure.

From then on, Tristan spent his lunch periods outside, walking the edge of the schoolyard where asphalt crumbled into marshland. He kept his head bowed, and when he came back inside, his ankles were purpled with mud. Nobody bullied him at school. Nobody minded him at all. And every afternoon, Cally and Abigail watched from Abigail’s bedroom as the Facebook posts continued, flashing onto the computer screen at an inexorable pace, gleeful, hateful, now from people they didn’t even know. Sometimes Tristan wrote back, defending himself angrily or desperately, but each comment he posted only renewed the energy of the attacks.
Johnson writes with finesse as she charts the tearing down of a person in such a vulnerable stage of life. These opening scenes provide a back-drop, and possibly a cause, for what occurs throughout the rest of these teenager's adolescence.

Turning to his left, he saw the red-orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, like masts of an enormous ship, like skyscrapers of an alien nation, like ladders to the sky. His heart beat frantically in his ears. Yet for the first time in a long time, he felt like he could breathe.
Bouncing between perspectives we learn more about those involved in this initial encounter and how their lives progressed. We learn, also, just how vulnerable each one of them is in their own right. Personal accounts flesh out the depth of each character while the contrasting viewpoint from one earnest, young teacher proves the degree to which these teenage characters will go to hide their undesirable emotions and characteristics.

And she’d realized there was something worse than being ignored; there was being a target.
Each narrative blossoms with emotional depth and unexpected weakness. A raw examination of the truth behind the lives of teenagers today. Though admittedly the focus is on upper middle class, white narratives, the problems faced are real. Johnson appears to put much of her personal story onto the page and her work shines as a result. The Most Dangerous Place On Earth is a young adult crossover that deserves a special place on your shelf.

There was only the decision to get up. There was only standing and brushing herself off, only turning and hiking back to her friends whose hoots and laughter carried through the trees, to her friends who were flawed but, yes, living; there was only digging through her bag for the last remnants of high school, throwing them into the fire. As the flames ate the papers to curling black, she knew there was only this, and whatever moment would come after, only Calista Broderick going on and trying, like everyone, to live in this beautiful world.

I was in no hurry to start reading this book, but once I did, wow, I wish I had started it sooner. The book is divided into many different chapters. Each chapter highlights a certain teacher or student. Often, the author would come back to the same character.

The book begins with eighth grade and the suicide of a student who is being bullied. The following chapters take us through high school and the various students affected by this initial incident. The high school is in a very wealthy community. The students are privileged and yet seem to be more unable to cope than the average student in different socioeconomic areas. It was a compelling read and one that I thought about long after it ended. I received a complimentary e-book from the publisher in exchange for a review.

Great engaging story with many smaller tales interwoven to tell the story of an affluent neighborhood. What happens when rich kids are left to their own devices? With crazy amounts of money, privileged and stuff it seems like you can get away with anything, but do you want to? Are there really no consequences? Do you learn from your mistakes when your parents can make them go away with their money? What is it like to have pressure to be a way you just can't be? Nd how far is too far for a teacher to reach out?
This book asks many questions, and leaves some open. Lots of scandals, many lives affected.

I was so excited when the approval on NetGalley came through for this book. There’s always been something to compelling to me about reading a bunch of privileged kids doing fucked up shit. But I’ve recently learned something about myself.

I don’t actually like reading about a bunch of privileged kids doing fucked up shit. At least not anymore.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is about a group of high school juniors who are all tied together by a tragedy that happened in middle school. They’re also all tied together by being horrible, shitty human beings but that’s neither here nor there, according to the book. I’m just going to come out and actually say what this tragic event was because there should be a pretty serious trigger warning on this book:

In 8th grade one of the “outcast” kids wrote a a very detailed love letter to one of the popular girls. She then showed a handful of her friends, who went ahead and posted it online. The result was a disgusting cyberbully campaign against the boy, and he ended up completing suicide.

This was just the opening chapter of the book and it made me sick to my stomach. But I’m not at all against this kind of content being in books and I’m not at all uncomfortable with books pushing me to my limits. What I don’t particularly love, though, is the humanizing of the bullies.

The rest of the book follows with a series of vignettes about the main players involved, broken up by a chapter from their English teacher’s point of view. These kids are all pretty terrible across the board. They can do whatever they want to whomever they want and they suffer no consequences, with basically one exception. There’s a lot of lying, cheating, and hurting other people just because that’s what is expected of you. The only character I found at all interesting was the teacher, and I was glad that there were breaks from the kids to peak into her life. She was one of those teachers who are genuine and tried to connect to her students. With these students in particular, it was a pretty misguided effort, but still. A good, caring teacher can change someone’s life.

The one thing I can say about this is that it felt authentic. I know a lot of people like to complain that not all teens are drinking or doing drugs or having sex. And that’s true. But there are tons who are doing all or a combination of these things. It happens all the time. The asshole kids felt like they could be real people. Even though they were all basic stereotypes, I could connect each character to someone I knew while growing up. And obviously, the book was engaging enough to allow me to finish it, which isn’t true for a lot of other titles lately.

I don’t think I could recommend The Most Dangerous Place on Earth to anyone really. It was actually mostly repetitive, with lots of scenes being repeated from different points of view. The writing was overly descriptive and I found myself skipping large walls of texts because I don’t need to know every single detail of say, a baseball glove. One the characters’ lives took a weird turn, but for the most part they all moved on to be untouched, privileged rich adults. I thought this was going to be juicier and more compelling, forcing me to keep turning the pages. But really, I could have lived my life just fine without ever having picked it up at all.

Pshew! Glad I don’t have to deal with the stuff the parents in this book had to deal with! Few books have made me feel so grateful—grateful that my kids were the hell out of high school before social media became the main game in town. Sure, some of the social scene in the sky is good (we all need to know that Brittany is eating sautéed Brussel sprouts in sunny Timbuktu, for example), but there’s an evil side for sure. And this book makes you look at this side up close.

Yes, this book made me mull over things well after I turned the last page. It’s the danger of digital that’s the big mull. Social media is this giant force that can mess with heads, especially the underdeveloped brains of teens. We’ve got cyberbullying, the race to be the first online to report some drama, the joy in gossiping in cyberspace. All three of these things happen in this book, with disastrous consequences.

Another thing this book made me think about is how each teen leads a secret life, one where their parents basically don’t exist. The teens’ real life is their peers, end of story. Parents can’t compete. It makes you realize how little influence you have over your kids once they hit middle school, how they are no longer under your parent spell. The teens usually work around the loving or absent parents and are in their own little worlds. This is sobering to people who pride themselves on being good parents and good communicators.

I really liked this book. It’s told from multiple perspectives of a bunch of rich teens and one sort-of-lost teacher. The author made each kid interesting, no matter how shallow or immature they may appear to the world. I found I was less interested in the chapters about the teacher, which was a pain because there were definitely more chapters about her. She was well drawn but boring. We get a really good look at each character—very rich and insightful.

The story starts at eighth grade and ends at senior year. Sometimes I thought of the book as a set of interrelated stories. Each chapter is a plaintiff solo, and as each section of the orchestra adds its part, the song created is cohesive and memorable.

The writing is clean, though now and then there’s a tiny bit too much description for me. There’s some online chat, and I liked this change-up in the narrative. Also, these cyber-conversations added a realness to the story and upped the suspense, as I fretted about what the upcoming train wreck would look like.

I have to laugh because there were all these big tragedies happening (with people experiencing much drama and disaster), yet the one scene that made me twitch, cringe, sweat, and fret was a party scene (!), where a house, not a person, was being destroyed. The teens had a huge party in a pristine house while the parents were gone. Really, I’m not Martha Stewart-like nor am I a neat freak, but the damage that was continually being done to this home was just more than I could take. And it went on FOREVER! I took every house affrontal personally; I felt like it was my house getting ruined. Ouch! Oh no, that didn’t just happen! Close your eyes!! Run! WTF??

I thought I had O.D.ed on student angst and tragedy, but this book grabbed me immediately and made me sit up straight. For those who read this book and have teenagers in the house, I applaud you. And I totally understand if you have to run to the doc’s for some Xanax.

One silly comment on the book title: The book says the most dangerous place on earth is high school. But to me the most dangerous place is cyberspace. Question: Is cyberspace on Earth??? Where is cyberspace anyway? I always picture it Up There, but hell, maybe it’s Down There. Or in the middle, at about our height. Or parallel. But wherever it is, it’s technically not on the earth, right? Just saying….

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

I was provided a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest and fair review. This book is about quite a number of people, centering mostly around Miss Molly Nicoll, a new teacher at the high school in Mill Valley, and her junior level English class. Molly is fresh from graduation and eager to make her mark on her impressionable young students’ lives, thinking that she might be able to provide something to these rich and spoiled students that they had been lacking up until now. But Molly doesn’t know the history behind her class, does not know what happened to them in eighth grade that affected each of them in different ways. And while she things she understands her students, she soon finds out that she doesn’t really know them at all. The book tells the story alternating between Molly’s point of view and that of her students. Each student is featured in a chapter where we learn more about their personal life and learn a little more about the story line with each.
Overall I liked this book. The story line was interesting if a little scattered. I liked hearing about the story from the point of view of different characters but at the same time hearing about so many people’s stories left me feeling like none of the story lines were particularly resolved. There were so many bad things that happened to these kids and I just felt so bad for all the mistakes that left them so screwed up. This did a great job of portraying how quickly bullying can get out of hand when its done online. And I also thought the author did a really great job of putting the reader into the shoes of the high school students, making the reader feel that desperation that comes with being a teenager in overcoming each new obstacle. This was a good book and I liked it, I would recommend it.

In Lindsey Lee Johnson’s novel the titular ‘most dangerous place on Earth’ is school — or possibly social media. Always smart and, by turns, funny, tragic and, frankly, terrifying, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is a sharp and compelling read.

As the novel opens, an unpopular eighth-grade boy writes a love letter to a popular girl, which ends up, as so many things do, on Facebook, with terrible consequences for all concerned. Johnson then skips forward three years as the same students are entering their junior year at Tamalpais High School in a wealthy town in Marin County, California. Friendship groups have reformed and some lessons have been learned, and yet many of the characters seemed doomed to make the same mistakes. Into the mix comes Molly Nicoll, a young new English teacher with lofty goals of making a difference in her students’ lives. Yet she has as much to learn about herself as she does about her students.

Johnson’s writing is convincing; she has a real ear for the dialogue of her young, precocious protagonists and her characters are realistic and well-drawn. The Most Dangerous Place in the World reminded me in of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, both in its darkly comic tone and its ambitious, over-achieving cast of characters. These characters are almost universally unlikable — some more so than others — but in this case, that didn’t bother me as I raced through the pages, finishing in a single sitting.

A riveting tense psychological thriller that is less murder mystery than psychological study of what happens when our illusions of safety and suburbia are shattered

An ok book that covers teenage life from cyber-bullying to seeing the consequences of our actions.

The book begins in the eighth grade at Valley Middle School. A beautiful school in Mill Valley which was recently declared the Fourth Best Small Town in America.

Thirteen year old Cally Broderick is impatient and restless for her life to begin. Her teachers keep telling her that she just needs to apply herself, but she’s more interested in her best friend, Abigail and Ryan Harbinger, the boy she has a crush on. When she opens her locker one day and a note falls out, she assumes it’s from Ryan. But it’s not, it’s a very long note from Tristan Bloch. Tristan is one of those kids that stands out for all the wrong reasons. Cally did NOT want a love letter from Tristan Bloch. She’s embarrassed by it. Tristan bares his heart to her. It’s all just too much for Cally and she doesn’t know what to do.

I was so anxious as I read this. I just felt like it wasn’t going to end well.

Teenagers. Crushes are the norm. However, when you have a teenage girl who cares very much about how others perceive her and add a boy who many consider strange and who has a crush on her? Add some mean girls and boys AND social media……deadly combination.

The book is broken into parts. Eighth Grade, Junior Year and Senior Year. We follow the same group of students through these years and we see how things that happened in the Eighth grade follow them, shape them and affect all of their lives in many different ways. These are all privileged students.

Nick is popular. He doesn’t want anyone to know how smart he really is. He’s also a criminal.

Cally/Calista is completely changed by things that happened in the eighth grade.

Dave is smart, but he has to work hard at it. He is constantly striving to meet his parents high standards. He feels that nothing about him has changed since grade 8 other than his shoe and shirt size. I really felt like Dave was more compassionate than the others.

Emma is a dancer who is self-medicating to deal with the stress of eating, sleeping and breathing dance 24/7

Ryan – The pretty boy. The bad boy who gets away with everything. I had such a hard time with this character. He seemed to have zero redeeming qualities. I felt bad in a way as this is a teenage boy but one that I wanted to throttle with my bare hands.

Elizabeth is beautiful, quiet….and lonely. So beautiful that the girls are jealous and the boys too intimidated to approach her.

Abigail is a mean girl who is looking for love in all the wrong places.

Damon is another “bad boy” but he doesn’t get away with things like Ryan does.

Molly Nicoll is the new English teacher In the groups junior year at Valley High. She’s replacing a teacher who just ups and leaves in the middle of the school year ( I can’t imagine why). She’s happy to be teaching at Valley High. Twenty-three and finally on her own. She cares about her students and truly wants to help them achieve any goals they may have.

Thirty-two year old Doug Ellison teaches Government in the class next to Miss Nicholl. He’s very involved with his students and has many roles at Valley High including helping with SAT Prep and Yearbook.

I can see that a lot of what happens in this book taking place in High Schools……bullying, sex, drugs, alcohol, peer pressure, cheating, suicide, social media. However, sometimes it just felt a bit over the top. Or maybe not. It may be that it felt like it was ALL happening at this one school. Almost like the worst of the worst. As I read I was asking myself……is it really this bad? I was hard pressed to find redeeming qualities of many of the students.

Things have changed so much. Nowadays, kids use their phones to answer questions. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers and Google their main source of information. But I’m not sure I should be so judgemental. Because in actuality when there is something I don’t know, the first thing I want to do is pick up my phone and ask “Siri”.

I asked my daughter what she thought the title “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth” meant. She guessed jail first but her second guess was high school. Social media is often at the center of so many of our conversations. Most of these apps are terrible for not only impulsive teenagers but many adults as well.

All in all I thought that the author did a good job in showing what is happening in our schools with our teens.

I think this is a very good debut novel. Interesting and thought- provoking. I will happily read more from Lindsey Lee Johnson.

Thank you NetGalley, Random House, and Lindsey Lee Johnson for providing me with an advanced readers copy of this book.

This amazing debut exemplifies the notion that reading fiction fosters empathy. Johnson’s beautiful prose and well developed characters, in the end, enabled me to understand and care about each of these characters, even the most unlikable of the bunch. Employing the structure of following a different one of the half dozen characters in each chapter we are able to see each one’s motivations. On top of all this she manages to tell a compelling story that keeps you turning the pages until the very end. I can’t say enough about this book and I will definitely be following Lindsey Lee Johnson anxiously awaiting her next book. (I received a copy of this book from the publisher for an honest review.)

This story follows a bunch of privileged kids from middle school when a tragedy occurs into high school. There is little hope for the characters in this story as they all face some sort of atrocity. The story starts with the kids in middle school when one child professes his love for another. The bullies of this school taunt him into choosing a permanent solution for a temporary problem. I wept over this first chapter. It was raw and hurtful.

One year later, we meet a new high school teacher who starts her career with optimism we hope every new educator would. She cares so much for the kids, some of which are still reeling from what happened. The story skips around and introduces a lot of the surrounding students to the tragedy. The problem is that they all have real issues of their own that do not ever get resolved. Not only that, but we don’t really hear from those kids again. The bullying is never really resolved. These awful kids go on to make horrendous decisions that will impact them for the rest of their lives.

This book leaves the reader helpless as these kids go on with their mistakes. We are mere spectators to the way the story unfolds and we don’t get much into how the characters actually feel. It is written about bullies and gives so many cliches. We get worst case scenarios with these kids that I scratched my head and asked the one question we all need to ask, where are the parents?

I know this is fiction, but I am a little horrified at the thought that kids live like this. I think the idea that these kids are just governing themselves without any kind of moral compass, is part of the point of this story. I wanted to put this story down, and probably could have at so many points, but I really needed to see if the story would ever circle back to the first girl in the book and what became of her. It did. Although I could have done without many of the kids in this story, the way this was written, I could feel the angst in these kids. I got invested without even meaning to. It was good and bad. I am torn on how to rate this. The writing by itself was good, but I think some scenarios were just for shock and awe and I didn’t enjoy that. I would not recommend this story.

Lindsey Lee Johnson worked at a private learning center where she tutored teenagers in writing. Her experience there has given her insight into the behavior of teens.

In her new book, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, Ms. Johnson follows a fictional group of teens from their last days in middle school through their senior year in high school. Johnson’s teens come from upper middle class homes in Marin County, California. Despite coming from privileged backgrounds, they face some of the same pressures as most teens do today— peer pressure to belong to the “right” group, to do drugs, to drink alcohol and party hard. They also face pressure from parents who want them to do well in school so they can attend prestigious universities. And then, of course, there is the inevitable bullying by classmates.

Ms. Johnson also weaves in the story of Molly Nicoll, a young first year teacher who strives to teach and mentor her students. As the school year progresses, Molly learns more than she expected about her relationships with colleagues and students.

Johnson’s coming of age novel is hard to put down as you get to know the students and their new teacher, and wonder how their story will end. This novel would appeal to older teens as well as adults.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Books for the opportunity to read the ARC of this novel.