Which school does Zoe land in? Not telling. All in all: big fun for select readers.
For its intended audience, a laugh-out-loud debut about admissions to Manhattan’s coveted private schools.
The story runs from September through February. All private school admissions must be sent in by the Thursday after Labor Day, and many of the parental twists and turns here are taken from real life, like one man’s donation of $1 million to get his obstreperous son into kindergarten. Helen Drager’s daughter, Zoe, is completing The School’s K-8 grades and now must get into a private high-school as a sophomore. Helen, an art historian, has asked for admission forms from six: the Fancy Girls’ School, the Progressive School, the Quasi Country School, the Safety School, the Very Brainy Girls’ School, and the Downtown School. Advising her is best friend Sara Nash, admissions officer of The School, which claims itself able to get any of its students into their place of choice. But queenly Pamela Rothchild, The School’s matriarch, plays hide-and-seek with parents desperate for help in getting their children into high school as she cozies up to big donors and celebs. Even Sara can’t fill the kindergarten quota without Pamela’s okay, while poor Helen, whose unhelpful husband produces TV Cooking Network shows, now wakes at three a.m. suffering from “nocturnal admissions.” Must Zoe’s best friend, Julian, a cross-dresser who had the lead in Auntie Mame, go to boarding school? With October as interview month, nervous Zoe asks Julian whether she should give blow jobs to be a popular coed in high school. November brings a collective soothing to the insecurities of parents. For admissions directors, December is the cruelest month, stuffed with eleventh-hour applications. And there’s funereal news for hopeful parents: haughty Pamela, overthrown, quits for a fictitious better job. January finds Helen fending off a romantic art dealer, while Sara, The School’s new head, does psychic housecleaning.
Which school does Zoe land in? Not telling. All in all: big fun for select readers.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53303-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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