Small Admissions: A Novel by Amy Poeppel (Emily Bestler Books/Atria, $26.00, 358 pages)
I was anticipating this book to be a downsized version of The Admissions, an earlier-released novel by Meg Mitchell Moore about the pressures of getting a high school senior daughter – one living in Danville, California, into an elite college. The Admissions was a funny and entertaining book, but it was also loaded with valuable information for real-life parents on how to attack the knotty college admissions process.
Small Admissions focuses on parents attempting to get their children admitted into a highly competitive pre-school/elementary school in New York City. While it’s also humorous, I found it to be overly light – both in the manner in which it’s written and in the lack of substantive, useful information. I expected more of the latter since the author previously “worked in the admissions office of a prestigious private school” in NYC.
On the plus side, this is a relaxing read – like watching a family comedy on network TV, or a film on Lifetime – and Poeppel occasionally gets off a good line: “Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It’s the only case in which the resources are limitless.” You may get better mileage and satisfaction than I did. (Perhaps.)
I Liked My Life: A Novel by Abby Fabiaschi (St. Martin’s Press, $25.99, 272 pages)
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is an honest-to-goodness ghost story. Madeline (Maddy) Starling is a happy housewife and mother. She has a successful husband, Brady, and a great teenage daughter, Eve. And then, suddenly, Maddy is gone – by suicide. This might be the end of the story, but it’s just the beginning as Maddy sticks around as a ghost; one who can observe what goes on with Brady, Eve, and other formerly-important figures in her life. She also has the power to implant thoughts in their heads – such as the notion that Brady needs to find a new spouse to take care of him and Eve.
Author Fabiaschi, in this debut novel, makes good use of the notion that people tend to feel the presence of a deceased person after his or her passing. Yes, there’s a touch of the plot used in the 1990 film “Ghost,” but the overlap is minimal. And she writes well in a ghostly voice:
“Everything in our house looked perfect, which was awesome when I thought everything was perfect, but disturbing now that I know the truth. It’s like we lived on a stage.”
And:
“Perhaps we all offer what we can, until we can’t, and then our loved ones step up or have others step in. Perhaps death exists to challenge the people left behind.”
In her ghostly existence, Maddy finds that she’s on a timetable. There’s only so much time to complete what she needs to get done – via earthly creatures, before her powers erode and she heads for her final destination.
Surprisingly, Fabiaschi sets up an ending that we can see coming from hundreds of pages away. Except that the book does not end that way. Well played!
Well recommended.
Joseph Arellano
Review copies were provided by the publishers.
Small Admissions was published on December 27, 2016.
I Liked My Life was released on January 21, 2017.
Note: Another novel that deals in a semi-factual way (“Based on a true frenzy!”) with the college admissions process is Early Decision by Lacy Crawford.
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