It’s a small book with a hot pink cover on which three bright yellow emoticons hover above the title, “ttyl”.  Flip curiously to the inside cover and you discover the entire book is written as IM, the electronic communications of three fifteen-year-old girls, “best friends…who vow not to let school stupidness get them down…or split them apart.”  The book jacket promises “a roller coaster ride of boy temptation, math torture, donut emergencies, and Queen Bee encounters…the humor, hangovers, and heartaches of high school, and the friendships that get you through it all.”  It sounded so innocuous that the word “hangover” slipped right by me.

My 6th-grade daughter read “ttyl” at a friend’s house and later suggested that I read it because it was “very inappropriate”.  I did.  Here were some of the incidents in the book:  a girl’s drunk father comments to her on the visible pubic hair of his son’s bikinied girlfriend; the girls acknowledge that one of the male teachers always stares at girls’ breasts; a rumor is discussed that one sophomore girl ejaculates when she reaches orgasm.  This is all by page 11.  But wait, there’s more:  a girl discusses losing her virginity because “one of us has to go for it eventually so she can tell the others what it’s like”; a  ménage a trios joke; the casual observance that most kids drink at parties, even the girls who “last year didn’t drink at all”, including two of the three main characters (the one who doesn’t drink “feels like a loser” about it); a girl is disappointed that her boyfriend is only a “snuggle king” and her friend suggests crotchless panties and a lap dance; the girls banter about Halloween costumes with oblique references to “nibble your carrot” and “itch his jock”; a girl admits that she went to a frat party, drank too much, disrobed from the waist up and danced on a table while kids threw money at her; and a girl lets a relationship with her 24-year-old teacher get completely out of control and finds herself in a hot tub with him.

Don’t get me wrong:  the book was interesting.  The author introduces ideas of peer pressure, sexual activity, social cliques, teen alcohol use, academic pressure, sexual harassment, parental alcoholism, and more, and she addresses each issue by the end of the book.  Although I found the irrelevance of their parents in these girls’ lives rather sad, what I really didn’t like was that I don’t think the topics mentioned above are appropriate for my 11-year-old, and had I gone simply by the look of the book and the book jacket description, I would have been misled as to the content.  And yet "ttyl" resides in the middle school library and in the section of the public library deemed appropriate for her age group.  (Amazon lists the book for “ages 13-17” and “grades 8-10”, which is decidedly on the way out of middle school, not on the way in.  And I’d like to be able to determine the appropriateness of a book for my child without having to invest an hour in Internet research or read it myself.)  Oh, how I wish there were a Screen-It for books, but since there isn’t, I would advise parents to remember that just because your kids are reading, doesn’t always mean it’s okay.