THE GIFTED SCHOOL

Four close friends, their husbands, their children, their housecleaners—and one application-only magnet school that will drive them all over the brink.

A Boulder-esque town in the Front Range of the Rockies, Crystal, Colorado, is a progressive paradise where four entwined families are raising their children, though death, divorce, and drugs have taken their toll on the group since the moms met at baby swim class years back. The women give each other mugs with friendship quotes each year on the anniversary of that meeting, and they get together every Friday morning for a 4-mile run, "a ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives…shared since they'd first started trimming up again after the births of their children." Beneath the surface, resentments are already simmering—one family is far wealthier than the others; the widowed mom is a neurotic mess; one of the couples didn't make it through elementary school and he's remarried to "a hot young au pair who was great with the twins [and] a willing partner in mindblowing carnality." Then comes the announcement of a public magnet school for exceptional learners, with a standardized test as the first step in separating the wheat from the chaff. The novel's depiction of the ensuing devolution is grounded in acute social observation—class, race, privilege, woke and libertarian politics—then hits the mark on the details as well. From the bellowing of the dads on the soccer field to the oversharing in the teenager's vlog, down to the names of the kids themselves—twins Aidan and Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury; best friends Emma Z and Emma Q; nerdy chessmaster Xander Frye—Holsinger's (The Invention of Fire, 2015) pitch is close to perfect.

The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more timely, and the Big Little Lies treatment creates a deliciously repulsive and eerily current page-turner.