"Looking For Alaska" was recommended by my 14 year old daughter, and was actually a pretty good story. The main character is a high school boy who is a loner, and transfers to a private school in Alabama. His roommate is close friends with a girl named Alaska, and the three form a close friendship.
What is nice about this book is that the characters are well thought out, yet are not all perfect - all have "normal" flaws, and nobody is extremely anything.
The story deals with lots of issues facing mid-teens, including drinking and smoking, and runs into drunk driving and an entire controversy about whether a death is suicide or an accident involving alcohol.
The book is good in that the characters do drink and smoke, but it is certainly not the standard behaviour of the school, and is kept appropriately hidden, which probably casts it in a realistic world-view. The death of a classmate is surrounded by grief, guilt and feelings of responsibility and loss, and launches all the main characters down the path of trying to understand what happened, and what role they played in the tragedy.
It is good that the book doesn't end with all the laces tied and i's dotted - real life doesn't give you those complete closures, it often leaves lingering doubts and questions.
The book does deal, though only in a few places, with sex, and the title character, Alaska, is certainly experienced in this area. I'd have preferred this to be toned down a little, but in the context of a drunk-driving death story, it might be a little odd to single-out the infrequent sexuality as a main issue.
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