For fans of The Nanny Diaries and Sophie Kinsella comes a whip-smart and deliciously funny debut novel about Kate, a young woman unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat world of New York City private school admissions as she attempts to understand city life, human nature, and falling in love.
Despite her innate ambition and Summa Cum Laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being unceremoniously dumped by her handsome, French “almost fiancé,” she abandons her grad school plans and instead spends her days lolling on the couch, watching reruns of Sex and the City, and leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don’t know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback, while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.
Miraculously, and for reasons no one (least of all Kate) understands, she manages to land a job in the admissions department at the prestigious Hudson Day School. In her new position, Kate learns there’s no time for self-pity or nonsense during the height of the admissions season, or what her colleagues refer to as “the dark time.” As the process revs up, Kate meets smart kids who are unlikable, likeable kids who aren’t very smart, and Park Avenue parents who refuse to take no for an answer.
Meanwhile, Kate’s sister and her closest friends find themselves keeping secrets, hiding boyfriends, dropping bombshells, and fighting each other on how to keep Kate on her feet. On top of it all, her cranky, oddly charming, and irritatingly handsome downstairs neighbor is more than he seems. Through every dishy, page-turning twist, it seems that one person’s happiness leads to another’s misfortune, and suddenly everyone, including Kate, is looking for a way to turn rejection on its head, using any means necessary—including the truly unexpected.
I REALLY enjoyed Small Admissions. I will admit that it took a bit for me to get enough backstory on the characters to really get into the book, but once I did I was glad I hung around through the first few chapters because the rest of the book was a quite charming, modern coming-of-age story. I appreciated the general real-ness of the characters in the they seemed like people I know and all have relatable life issues to other recent college graduates and parents of school-age children.
In fact, another thing that really set Small Admissions apart for me were the storylines of the different women. We followed three recent college graduates struggling to find jobs, love, and self peace. But we also followed different sets of parents struggling to get their children into the “right” private schools in New York, to make ends meet while providing the best possible life for their children, and to mend their somewhat broken relationships. There is a little bit of something for any woman from college to recent graduate to forty-something mother, which is very rare in a fiction novel these days.
