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Lädt ... Acceptancevon Susan Coll
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Although college is many, many years behind me, when I came across an old review of this book I was enchanted with the character AP Harry. I immediately went to my kindle and purchased Admission (oops). I was several chapters in (and completely engrossed) before the I realized AP Harry would not be making an appearance. Frankly, Admission with its focus on Yale admission officer Portia is the better book. Acceptance is engrossing in many ways, but ultimately fails because it focuses on far too many characters. You have the afore mentioned AP Harry and his concerned mother Grace. Emotional trainwreck Taylor and her pushy mother Nina. Sweet and confused Maya with her unrealistic parents. And Olivia a college admissions officer at Yates a college that all three students briefly visit, but only two apply to (and only one really even cared about). The inclusion of Olivia and the unrealistic straights the university suddenly finds itself in (sued by a native american tribe and suddenly without litigation insurance due to a vacation by a senile lawyer) detracted seriously from the novel. I'm also am not a fan of "cutting" as the new teenage angst and whenever I see it am reminded of painfully bad fanfiction. I loved however the whole mail thing, more so because my own mail service is unreliable at best. I guess this was funny... in a completely stressful way. I thought it was interesting to see the college admission process through so many points of view and it made me realize that 1) I'm really glad not to be in high school anymore; 2) while I was worried about where to go to college, there were other people worrying on my behalf; and 3) the cycle continues when you have kids of your own. Although it got off to a clunky start, I loved this book...it brought me back to the college admissions process (14 or 15 years ago, eek!) which, oddly enough, I thoroughly enjoyed at the time. It makes a great subject for a satire, especially with the growing competitiveness and insanity of the application process. At first, the characters seemed like types (a problem I also had with Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher, a similar book in style and subject matter), then they became more developed and rounded, and I thought the blurb on the back of the book -- "A satire with heart" -- was true. Characters included Olivia Sheraton (an ice-queen admissions officer who melts a little bit by the end), AP Harry (the miraculously obsessive student bent on getting into Harvard), Maya (the genial and attractive Indian swimmer, probably the most well-adjusted of them all), and Taylor (The Bell Jar-loving, vaguely Goth mail hoarder). As a college counselor, I felt I had to read this book, but it also grabbed me in as well with its quick style and familiar characters. The novel was based in a Maryland suburb, and it could have been set in Northern Virginia -- a DC suburb I used to live and teach in. The different storylines of the 3 main characters -- all high school students going through the college application process -- were engaging because they were written as real characters with real hopes and flaws. But as the novel continued, the surrounding cast of characters developed into every horror admission story caricature. It was still entertaining, and the ending is fulfilling. So, while I fear that the novel perpetuates stereotypes that will make my job harder, I did enjoy it as a fun, quick read. It links to our class theme, Utopias and Dystopias, because college has become so defined as a utopia -- something that must be achieved at all costs or your life will be a permanent dystopia. We see these students struggle with this pressure. I hope that through my own work as college counselor, I can bring perpsective to this unreasonable view of the whole college search process. And this is why everyone should read Loren Pope's _Colleges that Change Lives_ as the perfect antidote to the stress. There are wonderful schools out there, schools that offer in many ways better educations than "name schools" -- our society needs to learn this. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
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, 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. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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It was a fine read - I wouldn't go out of my way to read it though. ( )