Katie.com: My Story
by Katherine TarboxEP Dutton, 208 pp., $19.95
When 13-year-old Katie Tarbox logged onto America Online, she thought she’d found an understanding friend. When I bought the story she wrote about her whole ordeal, I thought I’d found an interesting book.
We were both wrong.
I admit my naiveté, duped by the alarmingly red cover, the subhead proclaiming this to be a “true story for the Internet Age,” the so-stupid-it’s-brilliant addition of a dot-com to the title name. Perhaps if I had bought the book online, I would have noticed that people who bought this book also bought Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul — yee-gads, Part III no less. But no, I was suckered in and slogged through the whole painfully earnest story — about Katie’s online correspondence with someone who turned out to be a 43-year-old Mr. Creepy — still waiting for the drama, the insight, anything other than the endless musings of a lonely, insecure 17-year-old girl. A typical excerpt reads thus: “Because my mother had to work hard to support us, for all of my life we have had various housekeepers and nannies. They did everything for us — cooked, cleaned, and ran all of our errands. But despite all their efforts I always wished I’d had a nanny like the one in the Harriet the Spy books. A nanny who would talk to me.” Log off! Log off! Although this novel might be of interest to similarly minded young girls, Katie.com instead seems designed to scare the bejesus out of parents (Suggested online guidelines at the end of the book include, “Never allow children unsupervised access to the Internet.”). Yes, the Internet can be a dangerous place. Yes, adolescence can be a mine field. I would relish a thoughtful treatment of how those two things collide, something that dug a little deeper than a Dateline NBC special report. ThisIsNotIt.com.
This article appears in June 2 • 2000.