[Paula Danziger is a writer like Judy Blume] who capitalizes on the sordid details of adolescence [and whose] "Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?"… is ruefully and relentlessly funny, in a style reminiscent of Erma Bombeck's. Danziger's heroine is fourteen, and, it says on the jacket, "her life is the pits."… In the end, the heroine feels a lot better because, in a moment of revelation, she accepts her dreary future. "My life's not going to drastically change," she muses. "It hardly ever does when you're a kid. My parents certainly aren't going to change that much…. What I am sure of is that I finally did something for myself, that I'm learning to do what I think is best for me." I took the last sentence to be the redeeming social message of the book. I also noticed that throughout this book and in many other...