Acceptance Author:Susan Coll A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle. — It’s spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. “AP” Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, ... more »a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed it on the top-fifty list of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. There, on Yates’s dilapidated grounds, Harry runs into two of his classmates from Verona High, an elite public school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There’s Maya Kaluantharana, a gifted athlete whose mediocre SAT scores so alarm her family that they declare her learning disabled, and Taylor Rockefeller, Harry’s brooding neighbor, who just wants a good look at the dormitory bathrooms.
With the human spirit of Tom Perrotta and the engaging honesty of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Susan Coll reveals the frantic world of college admissions, where kids recalibrate their GPAs based on daily quizzes, families relocate to enhance the chance for Ivy League slots, and everyone is looking for the formula for admittance. Meanwhile, Yates admissions officer Olivia Sheraton sifts through applications looking for something—anything—to distinguish one applicant from the next. For all, the price of admission requires compromise; for a few, the ordeal blossoms into an unexpected journey of discovery.« less
Anyone who has high-school aged kids will recognize every character in this book. This is a fun summer read for parents and students, if they can squeeze it in between practice essays and SAT prep. Acceptance is an enjoyable, quick read that I'm going recommending to all my friends.
this is a really fun look at the crazy world of college admissions. Intertwining three college bound seniors tales of glory and failure makes for a quick read
This book was much harder for me to get into than I expected it to be. It was slow going for a long time. There were several times when I almost stopped reading it entirely, but I held out till the end. The ending was anticlimactic to me. I didn't hate the book, but I just ended up feeling indifferent by the end of it. Sadly, there isn't a neutral option when choosing the number of stars, so I practiced grade inflation and gave it 3 out of 5 instead of 2 out of 5.
This story is told through the eyes of several characters including a couple moms, an interim dean of admissions at a college, and some students as they wind their way through the college application process. A very interesting fictional story that would certainly be appreciated by those parents and children who are working through the jigsaw puzzle of college admissions. This was a quick read for me, and definitely an entertaining method for me to learn a little bit about the processes my children will soon be going through.