Suburban Dangers

Gr 9 Up—Katherine (Kaki) Jones leads a normal suburban life. She's a straight-A student and track team member with divorced parents and a little brother. In this overstuffed problem novel, all it takes is one bad choice in friends to plunge a regular girl into the world of drugs, gangs, and sex trafficking. If Kaki's fall from grace, which reads a lot like Go Ask Alice, isn't traumatizing enough for readers, there are also her alcoholic stepmom, her pornography addict dad, and her younger brother, who has been caught distributing pictures of naked classmates and may be hanging out with a gang. Just another day in suburbia, right? Even the adults who provide eventual help have all dealt with the same issues—the detective was pimped out as a teen, as was the nurse at the rehab center, and the pastor at the church where Kaki's dad and brother seek counseling just happens to run a support group for porn addicts, born out of his own struggles. While the issues the author introduces are real, jamming them all into one book lessens their impact. Lee's characters are flat, and readers are unlikely to care about them despite their troubles.