Sign us up for smart, savvy ‘Small Admissions’
There are life lessons to be learned at the select Hudson Day School
Set against the backdrop of a prestigious New York City day school, Amy Poeppel’s debut novel is a book about rejection, acceptance and our ability to maneuver between the two. In Small Admissions (Atria, 356 pp.,
out of four), eeeE Kate Pearson is a bookish young woman whose life appears to be planned out.
The daughter of a pair of eccentric cultural anthropologists, Kate has decided to attend grad school for biological anthropology after graduating from Wellesley.
Fast-forward two years and Kate is a shell of her former self. Having abandoned her postgrad work, she is recovering from a broken “almost” engagement with the very French Robert and is living in a sublet as a less-than-successful dog walker.
Kate’s sister Angela arranges a job interview for Kate at the admissions office at Hudson Day School.
After a bumbling, comical sit-down, Kate is hired. At Hudson Day she learns to navigate not just the ups and downs of being an admission officer, but of life.
Author Poeppel has been on both sides of the interview process, as an admissions officer at a private school and as a prospective parent. Novels inspired by real life can get bogged down in trivial details or veer off into slapstick.
But Poeppel’s tenor is just right. She delivers a perfect balance between the totally believable — awkward student interviews — and the truly absurd — a tense showdown involving parents and firearms. Kate must mediate between over- and underwhelming applicants (mainly middle-school age) and their overbearing parents. At times you wonder if any of the parents promoting their children have actually met them. And at other times the feelings of parental love and wanting what’s best for their kids are palpable. We can actually feel the birth of helicopter parents, watching them take flight. If Small Admissions has a lesson, it’s that rejection does not have to be absolute. What appears to be an obvious failure may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as both Kate and these anxious parents come to learn.