Some parents believe that their children need to receive top-notch elementary education. A strong foundation could be the difference between a child who matriculates at an Ivy and one who takes a gap year that culminates in a permanent position at the local Jamba Juice. Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School takes place in a pressure cooker environment where parents will do anything to see their kids succeed.
My parents were not of this mindset. They grew up in the 1960s, an era of relaxed parenting, and believed that pressure cookers were best reserved for brisket. Since I grew up in a “just try your best” household, the antics of the parents in this book had more shock value for me, adding to the entertainment.
The Gifted School follows a group of family friends in Crystal, Colorado. In the interest of maintaining their friendship, Azra, Rose, Samantha, and Lauren have gotten very good at indirectly bragging about their children to each other. But amenity falls by the wayside when they learn that Crystal is opening a school for gifted children with selective admission. Each mother is positive that her children are most deserving of a place at the school and will stop at nothing to see them enrolled.
Holsinger takes the reader through the gifted school’s admission process through the eyes of helicopter parents and the young children subject to their high standards. An athlete, a troubled teenager, a spoiled brat, a wallflower, and a socially inept genius are forced by their parents to apply. They suffer through a cognitive proficiency test and struggle to sell their hobbies as achievement for their portfolios.
In addition to highlighting the shameless actions of success hungry moms, Holsinger also includes plotlines surrounding privilege and fragility in his fast-paced novel. Crystal is a wealthy but liberal community where the residents willingly acknowledge that privilege exists until they are prompted to recognize their own. Although these socially relevant themes have the potential to drive the entire story, they feel slightly out of place and eventually fold into one of the book’s subplots. Social issues give way to soapy drama as the families’ deepest secrets are brought closer to the surface the deeper into the admissions process they get.
The Gifted School is part satire, part soap opera, going down easy while providing socially conscious readers with thought-provoking themes that prevent the book from becoming a meat and potatoes beach read.
Even though it felt like Holsinger’s social commentary and his twisting plot did not always mesh, I still could not put it down.
Anna Spier recently realized that all of the books she read this year were authored by celebrities. She is excited to contribute to Hiranmaya because she needs a way to regain some of her credibility as a reader.
