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Judge Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight by its cover. Specifically, its back cover, on which one finds helpful vocabulary words and study questions to assist one in reading the book. If the droll language, a clever play on that of textbooks most should recall from their high school years, piques your interest, turn the book over and flip a few pages in. A solitaire-playing girl with a dry sense of humor greets you, apparently imprisoned for some sort of rather serious crime. If you want a story where everything turns out all right in the end, stop here.

Daniel Handler, author of the A Series of Unfortunate Events series under the pseudonym Lemony Snickett, has a penchant for black humor, for gut-wrenching "Why did I laugh at that?" moments, and for language perfectly suited to his audience but accessible to all. Free from the content-related constraints of children’s books, he takes his gift for the amusingly disturbing to the world of adolescent angst.

The Basic Eight follows one Flannery Culp through her senior year at Rower high, an academically intensive public school in San Francisco (Sound familiar? More on this later). She and her band of friends, vessels of constant apathy, sarcasm, and mocking eloquence, step with an ironic gait through the motions of their last year of compulsory education. Senior year is not without its difficulties, however. From the start, Flannery must cope with calculus class, a cagey heartthrob, weight anxiety, and an unsavory, downright creepy biology teacher.

Natasha, Flannery’s best friend, is the protagonist’s biggest confidant. Cool, composed, and a little dangerous, she’s determined to fix Flannery’s problems. Coaxing her friend to take action or just stepping in and doing it herself, Natasha catalyzes a spiraling chain of events with no good end.

Even with a slightly corrupting friend, a responsible, academically-motivated teenager like Flannery should have enough self-control to stop her from doing something really stupid, right? Just as we’re wondering this, our friend alcohol comes into play, along with its more potent companion absinthe. Irresistible to the group and its love of tongue-in-cheek sophistication, the green liqueur plays a part in the increasingly sticky situations in which Flannery finds herself.

The specifics of the plot are not particularly important to the enjoyment of the book. The power of the novel comes from the familiar, accessible voice of Flannery as the narrator. Most of the time she’s a bemused, detached observer, witty and together, but occasionally an angsty, confused 18 year-old comes out, irrationally obsessed over the most mundane things. The writing works because we’ve all been there, wise and practical advisors to others despite our blindness to our own faults.

The book is disturbing, sure, but it’s also hilarious at times. Handler has a great sense of authenticity when writing about teenage life, and San Francisco life in general. Whether it’s his take on the Haight, "a neighborhood full of hippie preteens and bookstores dedicated to the legalization of marijuana," or college, "a place where I can read literature in musty but well-lit libraries and play frisbee with people of different ethnicities," each description hits home, provoking a chuckle as I compare my occasionally idealized world to his sardonic look back on adolescence.

The Basic Eight, I believe, offers a quick, fun read for about anyone out there. However, there’s a certain subset of American youth who will derive more pleasure than usual from Handler’s book. These youth are students at San Francisco’s Lowell High, or those familiar with the school and schools of its type. Rower High is based on this school, with a location, faculty, and culture completely identical, though with a few phonetic reorganizations of teacher names. Our gut squirms up a little tighter than others’ as we laugh at Flannery cutting Calculus to sit in the library, because we’ve done the same. We may not (to my knowledge) have the same problems with sexual harassment, absinthe, or murder that the Basic Eight encounter, but aside from that, Flannery Culp narrates a good portion of our daily lives. It’s funny, and a little disturbing too-a great inside joke that occasionally hits a little too close to home.