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The Admissions brilliantly captures the frazzled pressure cooker of modern life as a seemingly perfect family comes undone by a few desperate measures, long-buried secrets—and college applications!
The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of northern California, and three charming kids with perfectly straight teeth. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school...
Firstborn Angela Hawthorne is a straight-A student and star athlete, with extracurricular activities coming out of her ears and a college application that's not going to write itself. She's set her sights on Harvard, her father's alma mater, and like a dog with a chew toy, Angela won't let up until she's basking in crimson-colored glory. Except her class rank as valedictorian is under attack, she's suddenly losing her edge at cross-country, and she can't help but daydream about the cute baseball player in English class. Of course Angela knows the time put into her schoolgirl crush would be better spent coming up with a subject for her term paper—which, along with her college essay and community service hours has a rapidly approaching deadline.
Angela's mother, Nora, is similarly stretched to the limit, juggling parent-teacher meetings, carpool, and a real-estate career where she caters to the mega rich and super-picky buyers and sellers of the Bay Area. The youngest daughter, Maya, still can't read at the age of eight; the middle-child, Cecily, is no longer the happy-go-lucky kid she once was; and the dad, Gabe, seems oblivious to the mounting pressures at home because a devastating secret of his own might be exposed. A few ill-advised moves put the Hawthorne family on a heedless collision course that's equal parts achingly real and delightfully screwball.
Sharp and topical, The Admissions shows that if you pull at a loose thread, even the sturdiest of lives start to unravel at the seams of high achievement.
"Every once in a while I read a book so good that the quality of my entire life improves. The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore is a fun, fast-paced, completely engrossing tale of a California family trying to get their eldest daughter into Harvard." - Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times Bestselling author of The Rumor
"The Admissions is a smart, hilarious, compelling novel about college applications, suburban scandals, and risky secrets. I couldn't stop reading about the Hawthorne's - a picture perfect family who will "Keep up with the Joneses" until they burst."
- Jennifer Close, New York Times bestselling author of Girls in White Dresses
"When a high school senior is vying for Harvard, her whole family sizzles in the pressure cooker and schadenfreude (good SAT word) runs amuck. Meg Mitchell Moore takes aim at the emotional mayhem of an upscale West Coast family who wants the American dream writ large. This novel is achingly real and delightfully cheeky." - Sally Koslow, author of The Widow Waltz and Slouching Toward Adulthood
"A wonderfully complex and relatable portrait of a family and the secrets they keep to protect each other and themselves. When the truth threatens, you'll turn pages faster than ever." - Charity Shumway, author of Ten Girls to Watch
"An important subject has its novel: Meg Mitchell Moore's The Admissions is an engaging, droll and spot-on study of what happens when aspirations become obsessions, when integrity and good sense bend to the allure of preferred outcomes." - David McCullough Jr., author of the international bestseller You Are Not Special
"Meg Mitchell Moore is a tremendously talented storyteller. Brimming with humor and warmth,The Admissions introduces readers to a family so insightfully drawn and deliciously flawed that it will remain with you long after you reach the final page...I loved it!" - Meg Donohue, USA Today bestselling author of Dog Crazy and All the Summer Girls
"With her razor sharp wit and stirringly keen insights, Meg Mitchell Moore digs deep into the zeitgeist of a modern family desperate to keep their heads above water. Add in long-hidden secrets, cutthroat college admissions, and revolving perspectives and you have an undeniably addictive read." - Emily Liebert, author of When We Fall
This information about The Admissions was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Meg Mitchell Moore is the author of the novels The Arrivals and So Far Away. She lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband and three daughters.
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