Book Pages

Got the perfect spring read, and it brings back memories of our daughter's pre-college preparations, those whirlwind college visits, filing applications, writing essays and poems, all the nail biting on which way to go for the next four years of her life. It is Admission, written by Jean Hanff Korelitz. This book tells the story of Portia, a Princeton admissions officer. She begins a tour of New England private schools, after moving her post from the West coast, and stumbles into a new and small crunchy granola sort of school in the outback of New Hampshire. There she finds a teacher she falls in love with, and her adopted out son she had 17 years earlier, and never shared news of with her mother or her partner at Princeton. When she returns from her journey, her partner leaves her, to be with a lover who is now pregnant with his child. Portia continues on with her job, but spirals into depression, barely functioning. The teacher from Quest, the New Hampshire private school, comes into town with her son and other students in tow, to tour Princeton. She is reunited with him, he "rescues" her from her depression, enough to realize that she has to come to grips (her personal admission) with her son's future. She performs a dishonestly moral act of changing transcripts to get her son accepted into Princeton, loses her job, and moves back to Vermont to reconcile with her mother, but is on the road to admitting her needs for love and reconnections. I learned so much about the processes of student applications, interviews, essays, and tests, and how they are judged by readers and admissions personnel, not just at Princeton, but all over the U.S. And of course this all brought a BIG sigh of relief, that we don't have to face THAT all over again.