Admission

Admission

YA fiction
"On the porch, seven men spread out in a line, all wearing black
bulletproof vests, lettered like my pants (although theirs say FBI,
not WVHS, of course), guns pointed in that way you see on television
procedurals. Two-handed grips. Serious faces.
This must be some sort of joke, I think."
Chloe, protagonist of Julie Buxbaum's Admission, is sure what
she's seeing can't be real. Maybe it's a prank in honor of her
actress mother's upcoming fiftieth birthday. She's horrified when the
armed men handcuff her mother and take her away in a cruiser.
Choe is even more horrified when she learns why her mom was
arrested. Joy was one of the dozens of parents caught up in a college
admissions scandal. In other words, her mom (and maybe also her dad)
committed felonies to get her into a good college. Her mom could be
in prison for decades. There's even a chance that she, herself, could
do time. The public is very angry because they're seeing just how
rigged the system is.
The narrative is divided into alternating now and then
segments. In the now segments you see a family struggling to gain
control of a situation not even teams of lawyers and publicists can
make go away. The then segments delineate the months leading up to
the arrest.
"When the college admissions scandal broke and was splashed all
over the news and social media, I became obsessed. The material was
endlessly juicy. The greed. The entitlement. And of course: the
nerve. Yet that wasn't the part of the picture (or the only part) that
fascinated me. Underneath, I felt that the scandal was a story about
teenagers and their parents, about families, about how the
expectations of one generation shape the next..."
Fortunately her family emphasis didn't cause Buxbaum to tiptoe
around systemic sources of privilege and oppression and moral and
ethical issues. A couple of the characters readers will probably most
empathize with are seriously disadvantaged by race and class.
In my mind Admission is a great choice for reading and
discussion by college bound teens and the significant adults in their
lives.
On a purrrsonal note, I hope you had a good long weekend even if your
weather was less than optimal. I had a good weekend. Saturday Eugene
and I went on a road trip. We went so far north I could see Canada
across a river. We stopped at some yard sales. I actually ended up
talking to a college student who shares my love of research and
statistics. (Jules)
Sunday Jules and I went to zoom church. (Tobago)
A great shout out goes out to our Amber. Saturday was her happy
birthday.
Tobago and Jules


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