alarming rate

“Kit had paused in the doorway, leggy and boy thin in her slip; nothing like Fancy, who had begun to develop at an alarming rate since her fifteenth birthday a few months before.”

Simon & Schuster: Slice Of Cherry

“Then there’s the collapse of the two-parent black household, a phenomenon that is occurring at such an alarming rate when compared to the rest of American society that what was once a difference in degree has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men that renders black children more vulnerable-and for which there is simply no excuse.”

The Audacity of Hope