"Michael Leahy's "Hard Lessons: Senior Year at Beverly Hills High School" traces the last year in the high school careers of six very different seniors....
All I know is when I can share the feelings of--and am touched by--someone who treats cocaine the way I treat chocolate chip cookies, the author is doing something right.
It is also very heartening to see the adults in the story treated with the same density and originality as the students....
Ultimately the book portrays a world that has lost its larger vision. Full of pressure to get into the right college, which will lead to the important job, which will lead to the "serious bucks." But in between all the hard lessons, the beautiful one they were never taught is to always remember to have a dream. By the end, I had grown so fond of the characters that I wanted to tell them.
However, "Hard Lessons" is not attempting to change their world, it is simply showing it as it is. This book may make a lot of teen-agers feel a lot less alone. And in a pre-college time of isolation and depression and suicide, that is an incalculable gift."
--Kendall Hailey
"Somewhere between the spirited innocence of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the amoral hedonism of Less Than Zero are the real teen-agers that inspired them: in this entertaining and revealing book, Leahy captures their lives, thoughts, and feeling, and he does so with honesty and respect. Leahy spent the year 1985-86 interviewing and observing seniors at wealthy, competitive Beverly Hills High. He's constructed six composite profiles and leads us through senior year with a narrative style that combines novelistic technique with documentary intent. The result is a smooth tour of a world peopled by stressed-out, premature adults. The expected casual sex and drugs are here, and wealth taken for granted is striking, but looming much larger is unrelenting social and academic pressure. These are young people careful not to reveal themselves to friends--anything nonconformist might be used against them, affect their social status--and for many, concerns about grades, college and career leave little room for being kids. Leahy doesn't belabor it, but, clearly, their parents--professionally successful, but mostly divorced and disillusioned--shaped this world. Their children suspect there's right and wrong, but they've never seen the point in choosing between them. Politics and religion are a waste of time and love an unlikely extravagance: success is all. And in Beverly slang, to succeed--in business, school or seduction--is ""to scam."" Leahy is skillful enough to have it both ways: a disturbing portrait of the next generation of overachievers, his book still retains the vicarious fascination of the highschool expose genre"