Rating: 
Summary: Yuppies can be trashy too!
Review: This book made me sick, and I don't know how I finished it. I cannot believe this woman wasted her time writing a book about her obviously spoiled daughter. There was no excuse for this girl's behavior, and maybe if her mother had set standards when she was twelve or thirteen, rather than wallowing in her own self - pity, none of this would have ever happened. Living in a slummy neighborhood surrounded by poverty and crime, it disgusts me to see such a privilaged girl living in Marin County, the wealthiest county in the United States, thinking she was so persecuted, when in fact she lives better than most children in the United States. Oh boo hoo, her mother was divorced, but so are about half the households in the United States, and I don't see my friends and classmates acting like slovenly whores, cutting classes, and participating in drinking and drug use.
Rating: 
Summary: Lara way too easy on herself...
Review: This was a very frustrating book to read. The author seems completely disconnected from how her choices led to the problems she had with her teenage daughter. Starting with her decision as the mother of two pre-schoolers that she didn't want to be married to their dad anymore. Couldn't she have figured that out a few years earlier? Next she applauded her pre-teens daughter challenging authority by way of dress, school behavior, etc. She thought it was whimisical that her daughter decorated her bedroom with condoms.
So then when her daughter later defies her, becomes sexually active at a young age, and is generally self-centered and thoughtless, Lara cannot see the connection between this behaviour and her own poor parenting skills. And most annoying of all, is Lara's habit of dumping her daughter to live with family and friends, then becoming enraged when they criticize Morgan. I can't believe that one friend (Suzanne?) actually wanted Morgan to babysit her kids. I wouldn't have allowed a girl with Morgan's problems unsupervised access to any child. Over and over again, Lara seems incapable of understanding the relation between how she raised her daughter and the acting out that her daugher emgaged in. And of course, the irony of the "upbeat" ending. A degree from UC Santa Cruz in philosophy does not provide a graduate with too many career options. Let's see maybe waitressing... And lastly, I find it offensive that Lara mined her daughter's troubles for her literary endeavors. What an invasion of her daughter's privacy! We all act out during adolescence, but most of us don't have parents who will exploit our misadventures for teir own purposes. I think that some of Morgan's acting out may have been because of the undesired exposure from her Mother's newspaper column. The only good thing about this book, I think, is that it can serve as a model of things to avoid in parenting. Don't be overly permissive and don't ignore the warning signs.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadly, a kindred spirit
Review: Two years ago my grandmother-in-law, sage that she is, gave me this book as my husband and I embarked on the rocky teenage road with our then 13-year old daughter. My similarities with Lara's family are profound: I am married to a wonderful man who has embraced (and adopted) my child from a previous marriage; I have fretted, cajoled, and attempted everything from prayer to tough love to help my desperate daughter find her way; I have talked sensibility into myself, only to lose it in a moment of desperation, panick, and fear. My daughter is now 15 and beginning a new life in an emotional growth boarding school...the last hope of terrified and devastated parents. This book leaves me hope that we, too, can come through this seemingly endless nightmare with relationships intact. I highly recommend this book to anyone dealing with a child with entitlement issues, drug usage, sexual acting out, and defiance issues. My daughter read this book and she, too, has gained hope from it.
| 
