The Most Dangerous Place on Earth: A Novel

Molly Nicoll is a freshly minted English teacher who eagerly wants to connect with her class and starts to get attached to the lives of her students, who she doesn’t know as well as she thinks she does. Unbeknownst to Molly, her core cast of students is complicit in some way with a peer’s suicide in middle school, which is the common thread of plot that is supposed to keep the story grounded.

Some of the characters’ story lines were more thorough than others, and it was sometimes hard to believe that the tragedy was the main cause for the type of people they turned out to be and the decisions they made. I didn’t necessarily attribute their personality traits to the burden of their classmate’s suicide without being actively told so.

The story was strong in that certain scenes did get a reaction out of me. I felt angry at times at the behavior of some of Molly’s students but also sympathetic. It was frustrating to read in moments but also effective, as it is with many of these coming of age stories. It was a nice literary look into a darker side of adolescence that some have to deal with.