Passing grade, though not top of the class.
Kate Pearson is about to discover just how far moneyed Manhattanites will go to get their children into the most prestigious private school.
A devastating breakup has left Kate’s life in a shambles. She finds herself back home in New York with no fiance and no job. By sheer luck, she lands a position as an admissions officer at the elite Hudson Day School, where she evaluates middle school applicants and their parents. Kate meets the typical cast of admit-lit characters: the spoiled underachiever, the too-perfect braggart, the charming scholarship candidate, and, of course, the crazy parents. With one notable exception, they do exactly what readers of this genre have come to expect: pressure, bully, throw tantrums, and threaten to sue when things don’t go their way. Debut novelist Poeppel delivers some fun and entertaining moments but fails to offer anything fresh or insightful in her tales from the admissions-committee room. Since the author worked in the admissions office at an elite prep school herself, readers might expect she would have more material on which to base her fictional tale. Aside from one point of high drama at the end, though, this book lacks the punch one hopes for in this genre. Diluting the novel's potency further is a supporting cast of Kate’s family and friends from outside the admissions world, none of whom is particularly compelling.
Passing grade, though not top of the class.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2252-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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