While readers will root for these kids, Coll’s affection for her targets does not detract from her bite.
A cheerfully pointed satire about the college-admissions process at a suburban Washington, D.C., high school where students and/or their parents have Ivy League aspirations.
In the spring of their junior year, Harry, Maya and Taylor are surprised to find each other at an admissions-information session at Yates, a small upstate New York college each high-schooler assumes is below the others’ expectations. Harry, better known as AP Harry, is one of those obnoxiously perfect kids who loves tests and has his heart set on Harvard. His divorced, hardworking mother, Grace, worries that Harry is too driven to excel, which is why she drags him to see Yates. Maya’s not-quite-stereotypical East Asian parents expect swim-star Maya to follow her sister into the Ivies, but well-adjusted, easy-going Maya knows she is merely a good student, not exceptional. Taylor’s mother, who never went to college, is desperate to have Taylor go somewhere more prestigious than Yates, but Taylor, whose relationship with her mother is prickly at best, falls in love with the school. As the admissions season progresses, Harry resents suggestions that he apply to the Univ. of Maryland as a fallback. Under pressure from her parents to raise her grades, Maya temporarily quits the swim team, but when she fills in at a meet, she breaks a state record. She is then wooed by USC, much to her parents’ relief. Taylor, whose application essay is disarmingly honest, is deferred from Yates. Yates admissions officer Olivia has been overwhelmed by the surge in overqualified applicants since a technical glitch listed the mediocre school as 50th on U.S. News & World Report’s list of top colleges. Bored and cynical about the process she oversees, Olivia is moved by Taylor’s application and invites her for a personal interview that ensures Taylor’s acceptance.
While readers will root for these kids, Coll’s affection for her targets does not detract from her bite.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-23719-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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