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Summary
Summary
"...part Gossip Girl, part Dead Poets Society, and entirely addictive! A brilliant, satirical peek at the families of privilege behind the Ivy Curtain, this book made me laugh out loud." --Kevin Kwan, New York Times bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy
In the decades before she was able to tell her own story, Lacy Crawford (author of Notes on a Silencing) worked with high school seniors trying to learn to tell theirs in the 15 years she spent as a highly sought-after private college counselor. The college essay could be a terribly nerve-wracking assignment--or, as Crawford saw it, an opportunity for a young person to set their sights on a future of their own--as Crawford illuminates in her debut novel Early Decision.
Working one-on-one with helicopter parents and burned-out kids, Anne "the application whisperer" can make Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford a reality--assuming, of course, that's what a student wants. Early Decision follows five students over one autumn as Anne helps them craft their essays, cram for the SATs, and perfect the Common Application, though their larger task might be balancing their parents' hopes against their own developing dreams.
It seems their entire future is on the line--and it is. Though not because of the Ivy League. It's because the process, warped as it is by money, connections, competition, and parental mania, threatens to crush their independence just as adulthood begins.
With wit and heart, Early Decision sends up the secrets of the college admissions race and celebrates the adolescents forced to run its gauntlet.
"I nearly cried with laughter over how true to my experience this book is. Lacy Crawford is spot-on in her portrayal of the anxiety, hilarity, and pathos inherent to the college application process." --Anonymous, SAT Tutor, Veritas
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This entertaining tale of upper class parents and adolescent learning curves points a keen eye at the college application process and the agony and ecstasy of getting that acceptance letter. Twenty-seven-year-old Anne with her polished Princeton background has somehow fallen into the college essay coaching business and is quite proficient. Enter Margaret and Gideon Blanchard and their daughter Sadie who has been groomed from birth to attend Duke as a legacy. Anne sets to help Sadie polish her essays and in the process they discover each other's strengths and weaknesses. Anne is dealing with an unruly upstairs neighbor who hates her dog and may be stealing her newspaper, a philandering actor boyfriend, and her own unfinished aspirations, while her students deal with their sexuality, finding their voice, and escaping their parents' expectations and jealousies. Wealth and privilege are in no way major indicators of who gets in where, and sometimes they hold the perfect student back, but with the right help and support, such as Anne supplies, those students find their way despite themselves. Sprinkled with tips for writers-"it isn't so much about editing as it is about aligning execution to intention," essays in various forms of re-write, and a very satisfying twist at the end, the reader is lead through a long, dark supervised High School hallway and off to the freedom of the great lawn. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A struggling young tutor tries to find her destiny among the children of privilege in this cutting peek at the vicious world of college applications. Based largely on personal experience, Crawford's debut novel explores the rarefied world of Anne, a bright but world-weary English major who has fallen into the unusual trade of "Application Whisperer," helping affluent Chicago high school students tweak their personal essays and nail their college applications. Anne is also wrestling with her personal identity, unsure of her own talents, ambitions and security. The novel focuses on Anne's students, all of whom are blandly unique in their own way. There's a hunky young tennis player who only wants to run with the wild horses in Montana, the wealthy daughter of an Ivy League university trustee and a gay theater buff afraid to confront his aggressive father. The ringer in this exclusive club is Cristina, a Guatemalan illegal immigrant whose brilliance belies her origins. "She was helpless to reframe eighteen years of parenting and generations longer of expectations," Crawford writes of Anne. "She was just a custodian of fate, as she pictured herself now, an orderly, shuffling alongside these kids. Perhaps offering them a bon mot. Sending them through the next set of doors, and turning back each spring to where the new kids were waiting." And while the children are all well-characterized, their parents are portrayed with enough delicious malice to flirt with satire. To ratchet up the personal drama, Crawford tosses in Martin, a vain but ambitious young actor whose boyfriend status seems like a fleeting afterthought, and a nasty upstairs neighbor who plots to unravel Anne's perilous residency in her building. Crawford delivers a palpable sense of pathos into this absurdly complex process, but non-parents and other parties immune to the cult of the Tiger Mother may find trolling through adolescent essays a bit laborious. Much like The Nanny Diaries--sincere and readable.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
According to Anne, the college admissions consultant in Crawford's savvy first novel, even the most-educated teens strike out on writing their first drafts of college-admission essays, possibly because of the obvious importance. Anne's secret, as she tells the high-profile parents who constitute her clientele, is to sift through their children's drafts for a promising moment or image: It's when you feel their heart has shown up. . . . You make them forget they're being watched. Crawford does offer some comic caricatures of highly privileged helicopter parents, but the hearts of the students beat a true, steady rhythm throughout the novel. Anne, who is 27 and educated at Princeton and the University of Chicago, appears stoic and calm to her clients, yet flails about in her personal life. Her boyfriend is pretentious and inconstant, her career not entirely sustainable. As Anne dreams about suddenly finding her grown-up, confident self, she mirrors some of her students: Like Gregor Samsa in reverse, she'd reach her two feet to the floor and head into the world a whole person. --Alessio, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist