Not Pretty Little Subject Matter

Anyone who knows me knows I have a penchant for trashy television (Real Housewives, anyone? Big Brother? And shame of all shames - any of the Kardashian shows?) but I also love a good, juicy read as much as I love the latest serious fiction blockbuster. I've heard a lot of good things about the hit ABC series Pretty Little Liars, but as with any TV show or movie based on a book, I always feel compelled to read the book first. A few weeks ago I picked up the first book in the PLL series and sped through it pretty quickly - it's not exactly deep, thought-provoking prose so it wasn't that difficult.
It hit the spot for what I was looking for - fluffy, easy reading. What I was not prepared for was the extremely mature subject matter. I am not a prude by any means (hello, look at my taste in TV!) but I was not overly impressed with the seventh grader stealing her high-school aged sister's boyfriend, or the high school student making out with her English teacher after he had bough her several shots of whisky (what teenage girl drinks whisky??) There was also quite a bit of pot smoking going on, not to mention the character who drunkenly stole her boyfriend's BMW, crashed it, walked away, and then got out of any legal trouble because her mom hooked up with the police officer to get her off.
This subject matter is bad enough for a high school-aged student. I was there once, I know that as far fetched as some of it is, a lot of it can and does happen at that age. What mortified me was the flashbacks I had to my middle school students who read this series. I am not yet a mom of a middle school-aged child, but I know that as much as I will (and already do!) encourage my girls to read, I don't want them to be readers at any cost. There is some literature out there with heavy subject matter that is great fodder for discussion - that I will encourage. This does not fall into one of those categories. My fear for this type of book is that it makes a lot of the activities in it ok and gives them a sense of normalcy.
Monitoring what my girls watch on TV and do on the internet won't be overly difficult, but this woke me up a bit to the idea that we are going to have to also pay very close attention to what they are reading when they get older. I used to subscribe to the theory that kids read so little today that any reading is good reading, but now that I am a mom and I am beginning to realize what is out there, I am revising that theory.